Productivity improvement in appliance manufacturing

ABSTRACT

Simulation can be a useful tool when analyzing complex manufacturing systems to help sort through cause-and-effect relationships and gain a better understanding of what is actually causing a particular problem in the system. Once cause-and-effect relationships are identified, changes for improvement can be made more intelligently and then verified using simulation. This paper describes an application in which simulation was used to identify the bottleneck of a dishwasher tub manufacturing line. Engineers were then able to determine and verify a solution to the bottleneck which resulted in an annual cost savings of $275,000.