Productivity Improvement through Cycle Time Reduction and Line Balancing: A Case Study of Machine Shop

Competitiveness among the manufacturing industries is rapidly increasing because of industrialization. In today’s era, every manufacturing industry is trying to produce low cost products with superior quality and with propriety to deliver them in stipulated time period. Every manufacturing organisation needs appropriate system to produce high quality products in minimum cycle time, which can be achieved by maintaining higher productivity. In this research study, an attempt has been made to enhance the productivity of automotive component oil pan by reducing the machining cycle time and balancing the line to avoid unwanted movement of work piece and bottlenecks. It has been found that by incorporating CBN cutters and spot facing tool in machining, cycle time has been reduced by 7.02minutes per job. U type machine layout has been suggested to balance the production line.It has been observed that, with reduction of cycle time by 7.02 minutes per job, production capacity per shift can be increased from current 28 jobs per shift to 36 jobs per shift. With machining of additional 8 jobs per shift, production capacity of oil pan can be increased from 2000 jobs per month to 2900 jobs per month. Keywords: Productivity, Cycle Time Reduction, Line Balancing, Machine Shop

Influence of the Mold Material on the Injection Molding Cycle Time and Warpage Depending on the Polymer Processed

The thermal properties of the mold influence the cooling situation in the injection molding process. While there are experimental studies investigating the influence of special mold materials, they are limited to few polymers. In this work, an extensive parameter study with the simulation software Autodesk Moldflow Insight was performed to analyze the influence of the polymer itself on the impact of the mold steel on cycle time and warpage. The investigated part was a box with two thickness variations. A conventional mold steel was compared with a steel grade featuring approximately double the thermal conductivity. Simulations were performed with 18 polymers covering the most common material families. The main finding of this study was that the influence of the higher mold conductivity on cycle time ranged from an almost negligible reduction (3%) up to a strong effect (24%), depending mainly on the used polymers, but also on the part thickness. For the cycle time reduction, a correlation was found, with the melt, mold and ejection temperature being the dominant influencing factors of the polymers. With this correlation, it was possible to estimate the potential of cycle time reduction for other polymers. The simulations also showed a positive influence of the higher mold thermal conductivity on part warpage.