Productivity Improvement through Bottleneck Identification and Elimination in a Pump Assembly Line Using Simulation

Any manufacturing industry strives for improvement on a continual basis either to satisfy ever increasing customer demands or as a matter of self-sustained drive. Avenues for continual improvements can be either processes that are stable and capable or those that are causes of concern on a routine basis. One cause of concern in any manufacturing process at the operating and managerial level is bottleneck. Bottlenecks are a common phenomenon in any manufacturing system. These bottlenecks could sometimes be systemic in nature demanding huge investments and top management intervention for their elimination or those that can be eliminated as a matter of routine process improvement exercises. In this work, industrial engineering techniques and simulation was used to identify and eliminate bottleneck in a pump assembly line of a local industry, specializing in the manufacture and assembly of electric motors and pumps with customers in the domestic and industrial sectors. An assembly that was critical in terms of revenue was selected for study. ARENA was used to model and simulate the existing assembly process. Analysis of simulation results followed by a careful study of the assembly process indicated winding section as the bottleneck. Suggestion of additional resources in the winding section to eliminate bottleneck resulted in a 33% improvement in productivity