The Balance Improvement of Final Assembly Water Pump Business Unit Tracks Section : Case Study

¹ Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Sumatera Utara, Almamater Rd., Medan 20155, Indonesia.
² Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Sumatera Utara, Almamater Rd., Medan 20155, Indonesia.
³ Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Engineering, University of Sumatera Utara, Almamater Rd., Medan 20155, Indonesia.

^* Corresponding author: ikhsan.siregar@usu.ac.id

Abstract

This research was conducted at an electronic field assembly company. The company implements a production system that starts from semi-finished goods to finished products. The problem of the company is the imbalance of the production trajectory. The track balance in the final assembly will affect the amount of product that can be produced. The unbalanced track conditions resulted a bottleneck condition in the material flow from one work center to the other, resulting in delay time on the production floor. The problems are caused by large cycle times, thus resulting in different production capacities for each workcenter. The implementation of the theory of constraints is to identify the existing constraints and to obtain the optimum amount of workcenter as well as to allocate elements of activity in the workcenter, thereby improving the efficiency of the production line.. In actual trajectory there are 7 work centers with track path efficiency 59,80%, balance delay 40,20%, and smoothing index 74,47. The result of balancing in the production line using theory of constraint method obtained the repair solution by number of work center as many as 5 work centers with track efficiency value 88,65%, balance delay 11,35% and smoothing index 17,07.