Joshua Wong Kha Choon, Ezutah Udoncy Olugu and Zuliani Zulkoffli
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering Technology & Built Environment.
UCSI University
Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Olugu@ucsiuniversity.edu.my
Abstract
Assembly line design has direct influence on manufacturing productivity. Poor assembly line design will
increase the cost of production. The aim of this project was to remodel the production assembly line for
cost reduction while not decreasing the productivity by conducting process flow evaluation and developing
an improved model of the assembly line. The weight-distance method was applied to determine the score
of current shop-floor layout of the metal division assembly line. Using the same method, a proposed shop
floor layout is developed. Using the precedence diagram, manufacturing critical path for the current and
proposed layout was identified and reviewed using a discrete event simulation software. Total weight-
distance of the current layout was calculated and valued at 10584.822. Ranking of each department base on
the total closeness factor was used to justify the development of the layout design. Layout design A has a
weight-distance score of 7708.842 whereas layout design B has a weight distance score of 8564.902.
Through a discrete event simulation software, process flow for hood was simulated with batch size of 100,
150 and 200. Future research can focus on machining line balancing and methods of implementing
ergonomic standards and automation for repetitive processes.
Keywords
Automotive, Assembly Line, Weight-Distance, Shop Floor Layout, Simulation
1. Introduction
1.1 Background of Study
In manufacturing industries, the quality and quantity of product depends mostly on the design of the assembly line.
There are various problems that are associated with assembly line which can affect the overall productivity of a
manufacturing company. Poor line balancing cause increase in idle time and lead time. Having excessive process steps
in an assembly line requires more capital investment for machineries, equipment and workstations. Furthermore, poor
utilization of machines and equipment can cause inefficient utilization of available floor space and bottleneck is more
likely to occur in the assembly line. All these problems contribute by increasing the production cost of assembly line.
In order to improve the productivity without incurring additional cost, there is a need to carefully study the assembly
line in order to develop a solution to these problems.
The aim of this presented paper is to remodel the production assembly line process flow in order to boost the
productivity. The study will identify problems in a production assembly line and develop an improved model of the
assembly line process flow. This is then followed by the evaluation of proposed process flow model of assembly line
using Flexsim simulation software.
2. Literature Review
According to Askin (2002) a product is any item designed, manufactured and delivered with the intention of making
a profit for the producer by enhancing the quality of life of the customer. Products and parts are core components in
an assembly line. Majority of products consist of several parts which constitute the final product. Thus, parts can be
described as a unit of production that make up the final product. There are four major process types that engineers
take into consideration before selecting the right assembly layout. These are job process, batch process, line process
and continuous process. Each of these production type have a unique characteristic. The job-shop process method has
low production volume but workers will be able to perform vast variety of processes. Process method is flexible and
can have many different configured sequence of process. The batch process has a moderate production volume. This
method allow manufacturer to produce several variety of products either in small batches or large batches. This process
type is flexible as workers only need to set-up workstations and production equipment for a specific batch. The line
process has a high production volume and usually consist of a few major product. It is a repetitive process as all
product undergo the same standardized process. The continuous process has the highest production volume and is
only dedicated to producing one product. In the process layout, as the name would suggest is specialized in process
task. Workstations and machineries with similar processing capability are grouped together. These group will form a
department specialize in one general task such as drilling, inspection, welding and others. The group will be placed in
different but methodical section of the assembly line. Based on the shapes shown in Figure 1, the circles can be
assigned as the drilling machines, the squares as the welding machines, and the triangle as the rivet machines and so
on. Each department handles one specific task.
It has been asserted that a work center whose capacity is less than the demand placed on it and less than the capacities
of all other resources will result in a bottleneck (Schroeder, 2007). A bottleneck resource will constrain the capacity
of the entire shop and an hour added to the bottleneck will add an hour of capacity to the entire factory. An hour added
to the non-bottleneck work center will not help the schedule at all since the excess capacity exists there. This implies
that the capacity of the entire system is limited to the workstation with the longest cycle time. Generally, a
manufacturing line designer have two choices in implementing the modification made. Either they modify the existing
layout to the design plan physically and assess the performance or create a duplicate of the actual model to do analysis
before finalizing changes to the existing layout. Simulation is a method of evaluating and developing a design plan
under different conditions. Using the discrete event simulation (DES) software, engineers are able to duplicate the real
process into a model using a computer to run test for their solution. Thus, simulation functions are for decision making
and experimentation (Stevenson, 2009).
3. Methodology
The research methodology is divided into three phases for an organized approach to the solutions. Each phases are
described in the following:
Table 1. Methodology Layout
Phase Objective Description
1 Identify problems in the - Detailed study of assembly line and manufacturing process
Assembly Line flow to identify the root cause of problems.
3 Evaluate proposed model of the - Test proposed assembly line through model simulation using
assembly line using DES DES software.
The method of sample data collection is shown in Table 2 using Equation 1. Measurement will be repeated multiple
times for obtaining a precise and accurate data.
Table 2. Sample of Data Collection
Workstation Process Predecessors X1 X2 X3 R
A Process 1 - 36 32 33 4
B Process 2 - 13 18 15 5
C Process 3 A 21 23 24 3
D Process 4 B 31 28 29 3
E Process 5 D 22 21 23 2
Where,
Xmax = Time maximum, Xmin = Time minimum and R = Range
The method of calculating time element is as shown in Equation 2. Time element used to standardize the time cycle
for each process. Data table id presented in Table 3 to demonstrate the workstations and their times.
………………………….(2)
Where,
= Time Element
R = Range
= Minimum Total Cycle Time
= Minimum Time Sample
∑ 𝑋𝑚𝑖𝑛 = Summation of Minimum Time Sample
∑ R = Summation of Range
………………………………(3)
Where,
= Distance between block 1 and 2
= x-coordinate of block 1
= x-coordinate of block 2
= y-coordinate of block 1
= y-coordinate of block 2
………………….(4)
Where,
= weight-distance between block 1 and 2
= weightage
…………………….(5)
Where,
= Transport speed
= Distance
= Current Transport Time
……………………………..(6)
Where,
= Transport speed
= Distance
= Current Transport Time
Blocks Description
Using the Pareto analysis, the highest demand item produced in Category A is identified to be ‘Hood’.
Figure 5. Pareto Chart for top 64 Item Number produced from January 2016 to June 2017
The top 16 items account for nearly 30% of the product output. Figure 6 shows the current layout material flow for
hood according base on task and Table 6 shows the weight distance of this current layout.
Although the output quantity in percentage in both category B and C are higher than that of Category A, the variation
in items requires significantly more effort for a similar improvement benefit.
W D WD
A,B 12 113.782 1365.384
Two layout were proposed, which were layout design A in Figure 7 and layout design B in Figure 8. Based on this
layout, total closeness factor will be calculated and this factor value will ranked the layout from the highest to the
lowest. The highest ranking department will be selected first during consideration for the design of the proposed
layout. The weight distance comparison is presented in Table 7.
W D WD D WD
Layout Design A is selected as the proposed layout for having the lower weight-distance score of 7708.842
Figure 9 shows model of process flow using FlexSim simulation software. The batch size simulated for 100, 150 and
200 and the run time will stop once all material flow path are blocked. Idle time and processing time are recorded in
the following Table 8, Table 9 and Table 10 depending on the batch size simulated.
4.4 Discussion
It can be observed from the results that a relocation of the layout can have noticeable improvement on the efficiency
and productivity of the layout. During data collection, five data sample were collected to determine the time element
of the assembly line. By determining Euclidean distance of departments’ pair, the transport speed was determined.
Using the weight-distance method, the relocation of each department were justified and the proposed theoretical
Euclidean distance was determined. Presuming the transport speed is unchanged, the new time element between
department pair was determined. Table 11 shows the comparison between current and proposed layout using weight-
distance method analysis.
Improvement 26.92 %
Evaluation of the process flow was conducted to determine current productivity of the assembly line. Through
remodeling of the shop floor layout configuration, a lower weight-distance score was achieved by ranking each
department from the total closeness factor. Selecting the highest ranking department as the priority department in
design eliminated the need to guess and randomly select departments to reconfigure. A DES was implemented to
support the proposed shop floor layout design reconfiguration from weight-distance analysis. According to the results
obtained, the proposed shop floor layout yielded a higher productivity which is in line with the the objective of this
project. Although these improvement focuses on the Hood (Item no: JS105-44), other variation of hood product will
obtain similar results.
It was observed that the tools and dye used for manufacturing product in the assembly line was not properly maintained
or stored. The manufacturer have a large and diverse array of tools that manufacture specific models of product. It is
necessary to remove disruption by doing periodic tools and dyes’ maintenance. As a batch of work piece get
transported to another department for the following process, it was observed that the pallet of work piece was just
placed in the designated space based on order number but not in any specific order. This caused a number of issues
such as lower productivity and efficiency. Most work piece were made of metal that rust if left unused over a long
period of time. A recommendation for this problem is to organize work-piece according to item type followed by order
number as opposed to order number only to minimize lead and setup time. In each work cell, there are workstations
which utilize machine for processing. It is possible to reduce the number of processes or improve the process method
by machining line balancing to reduce processing time cycle. Implementing ergonomic standards and automation for
repetitive processes will allow operators to be assigned to task that requires more technical skills or task that cannot
be done by machines. Having ergonomic standards means to develop a workstation that is designed for efficiency and
comfort for the operator. Further studies can be conducted on this topic to reduce the fatigue among operators.
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Biodata of authors
Joshua Wong Kha Choon was born in Malaysia. He obtained his Bachelors in Engineering in Mechanical
Engineering from UCSI University Kuala Lumpur in 2017. He is currently involved in Industry practice.
Ezutah Udoncy Olugu was born in Umuahia, Nigeria. He received the B.Eng degree in Mechanical and Production
Engineering from Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka, Nigeria, in 2002, and M.Eng and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical
Engineering from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor, Malaysia, in 2008 and 2011, respectively. Dr. Olugu is a
chattered engineer (C.Eng) and member of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, United Kingdom (IMechE UK).
Currently an academic staff at the Department of Mechanical & Mechatronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering,
UCSI University as an Assistant Professor. His current research interests include green supply chain management,
reverse logistics management, sustainable manufacturing, quality management, maintenance & Reliability
engineering, ergonomics and occupational safety.
Zuliani binti Zulkoffli was born in Pahang, Malaysia. She received her B. Eng degree in Mechanical
(Manufacturing) field in 2007, and Master of Science in Materials Engineering in 2010 from National University of
Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia. Dr. Zuliani obtained a PhD in Machine Vision from University of Science Malaysia
(USM) in 2017. Currently, she is an academic staff at Department of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering,
Faculty of Engineering, UCSI University. Her current research interests includes manufacturing inspection, materials
science, smart manufacturing and embedded system development.