Identification, mitigation of bottleneck by capacity addition and economic analysis for copper cable production process: a case study

Abstract

A bottleneck machine in a production line will reduce the productivity of the whole. The results of having a bottleneck are stalls in production, supply overstock, pressure from customers, and low employee morale. This paper focuses on the identification of the bottleneck in the production process of “Bangladesh cable silpa limited” and after the identification, tries to mitigate the bottleneck. A bottleneck machine or process causes starving or blocking of parts in the system, thus, therefore, increases the non-value added time and reduces the system performance. In this work, the bottleneck process is identified by using ARENA simulation based on the highest utilization rate and longest queue length matrices. Then, the bottleneck is reduced by increasing the capacity or the number of the machine in the bottleneck process. We can see the effect of changing the capacity of the process without changing the actual production line. Calculating it in a conventional way is very time consuming too. The last step of the thesis is to do an economic analysis. Because when the capacity of the process is increased, the production rate increases but the additional capacity increases the cost of the production.

Keywords

• bottleneck
• capacity addition
• arena simulation
• cost-benefit analysis