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Productivity improvement of a sewing line of a garment factory by line balancing

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Author Affiliations

  • 1Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh
  • 2Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh
  • 3Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh

Res. J. Engineering Sci., Volume 12, Issue (2), Pages 31-45, May,26 (2023)

Abstract

Since the apparel industries should be associated with high productivity, production lines should be balanced in a less time and efficient manner. Line balancing technique rearranged production line having an optimal or sufficient balancing way by assigning tasks to workstations in sequence. The goal of this paper is set to improve productivity in a selected sewing line by analyzing existing data, conducting time studies, and applying methods to balance the line. Line balancing methods like- Ranked Positional Weight Method, Largest Candidate Rule and Continuous Improvement Method, were applied to obtain significant improvements like reduction in workstations as well as idle time and improvement in labor productivity and thus the efficiency. Having current efficiency of 43.96%, by RPW and LCR method, the efficiency was increased to 67.64%. Moreover, the best result was assumed by Continuous Improvement method, inferred increase in line efficiency to 69.06%. The number of workstations is also reduced from 20 to 13. Although having improved resultants, the limitations of lack of method study is considered and so the existing method is considered standard. Another one is the omission of performance rating. Workstations are assigned considering multi-skilled workers.

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