| Abstract | The main purpose of this study is to redesign a production line for a wheel-loader assembly plant. The plant concerned manufactures wheel-loaders
whose design has been modified specifically to handle agricultural products, particularly tapioca and rice, which make up a large proportion of Thailand's
export trade. This modified wheel-loader is extensively used throughout the Northeastern part of the country. The existing 11-work-station production
line is a feasible one, in which many in-process inventories are found at some points along the production line, while non can be found at other points. The steps of the study are: (i) investigating the existing process in the
wheel-loader assembly plant; (ii) breaking down the process into a set of work elements, each of which is associated with work element time and precedence requirements; (iii) applying a selected line balancing technique called "Optimum-Seeking Backtracking Technique" to· this line balancing problem and (iv) discussing the results obtained from Step (iii), and then drawing conclusions from the study. To redesign a production line, the work
elements are grouped and assigned to a sequence of work stations, with the objective of minimizing the cycle time, subject to the precedence requirements and the total number of work stations not exceeding a specified line
length. Eleven production lines whose lengths vary. from 5 to 15 work stations are obtained from the study. A comparison between the existing 11
work-station production line and the proposed 11-work-station production line shows that, by replacing the former with the latter, approximately 40%
of labor costs per wheel-loader can be saved, and the cycle time can also be reduced from 25 down to 15 hours. A computer program written for this study is used in Step (iii). It can also be applied in solving similar line
balancing problems. |