Redesign of air conditioner assembly process system for a medium-scale faculty

Abstract

From the study of air conditioning industries, Split-type air conditioner is becoming widely competitive and show high trends in household product, especially domestic market in Thailand. Small and medium producers usually aim their importance to a single aspect of financial, quality, technology, delivery, or else. They are not taking advantages from their core competence of the environment. This because no modern systematic tools and techniques are applied to identified the real situation, and truly observed into operational level. The sample Split-type AC factory is control by a manager who is highly sophisticate in technical field of air conditioning system. Therefore, management is mainly based on manager or supervisor’s intuitive experience. Workers do not have a chance to propose working opinions. There are no feasibility study and planning for current layout and production system. Bottlenecks occur during cycles of work because operations in each workstation are not balanced properly. It causes unexpected idle time and waste of resource utilization. Excessive material, work in process, finished inventories clutter all over the place and cover problems. The factory sets up a conversion team to implement 3 stages of redesign. First, the team analyzed current situations of the factory by studying through the products details, process flowchart, and department positions. The team indicated factors influencing them and identified the production characteristics by applying tools like Fishbone diagram, value-added ratio, and loads and distances layout analysis. Next is implementing cellular manufacturing together with an approach of Kanban method. An assessment is done comparing with traditional system in 5 aspects; the process and assembly time, the value-added ratio, the throughput time, the layout effectiveness, and possible benefits in quality. Results shown that throughput time reduce for almost 30% and value-added ratio increase from 10% to about 30% while defects and errors cause by suppliers and workers decrease near zero.