Cycle Time Reduction in Automotive Manufacturing

Today, there are a lot of problems occur in the Automotive Component Manufacturer Company. Amongst them, work not standardized on each process is the most serious one. Standardization work can help reduce the amount of time to complete the task without defects by efficiently guiding the operators. Other related problems include machines fail to clamp semi-finished products to the next station, stopper loose, and rework process which cause the car carpet size to miss the standards. All these common problems increased the cycle time of the car carpet assembly line. So, this study was aimed to investigate how to reduce cycle time of the car carpet assembly line in the Automotive Component Manufacturer Company which located at Port Klang area. Data was collected through interview and observation. To reduce the cycle time of the car carpet assembly line, Kaizen activity and line balancing are implemented. Kaizen is the continuous improvement process. Line balancing is used to manage the workloads among assemblers, to determine number of workstation and to reduce production cost of the company. The derived results show that the cycle time of the car carpet assembly line is reduced from 313 seconds to 131 seconds. This proves that kaizen activities and line balancing do improve the productivity up to 58%. However, to achieve more successful and effective improvement, further work standardization on each process is needed.