Application of cellular manufacturing concept in a furniture production company

Abstract

This thesis studies the high quality furniture production of the ‘Company A’, the small-to-medium sized-manufacturer, located in Thailand. The main problem is late delivery to customers. The objective of this thesis was to redesign of production process layout through application of Cellular Manufacturing concept in order to improve production efficiency. The researching process started with data collecting and production problem assessment. The analysis was performed to select proper operational strategy for suitable production process layout. Production process layout was re-designed from functional layout to cellular layout by applying Cellular Manufacturing Concept. The new improvement by Cellular Manufacturing concept resulted to shorter travel distance and moving time, reduced work in process, reduced delay and penalty costs, including product quality improvement and finally leaded to customer satisfaction. The results showed efficiency improvement both in production and quality. Focused on production perspective, more simplify factory and production process layout leads to reduction of product flow distance by 56.64%. Consequently, 57.33% of the total move time and 68.83% of the delay process were reduced. Likewise, the total number of work process and throughput time were reduced by 6.67% and 30.99% respectively. In terms of quality perspective, scrap and rework were reduced by 27.55% and 47.97% respectively. The reduction of 59.31% in late product delivery did not only reduce penalty cost in late delivery but also reduced customer complaints by 59.77% accordingly.