Productivity Improvement in a Rubber Roller Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

Productivity is one of the major factor that enable the manufacturing firm or organization to compete in the global market. Throughout the history of manufacturing, there has been a constant effort to improve the utilization of resources. Productivity studies aim at identifying how efficiently the resources in the system are used in producing desired production services.

In present study, rubber roller manufacturing process has been studied and work study concepts has been implemented to improve productivity. Grinding and binding processes have been identified and micro motion study has been carried out. Man, machine, material flow process chart were prepared and based on this alternate grinding process with only 3 cycles has been proposed i.e. rough cut, semi finish cut and final cut. The quality of rubber roller was checked for its quality. The productivity with grinding machine is improved by 50%.

Binding process with binding machines has also been studied. A man flow process chart was prepared from micro motion study. From the process chart, it has been proposed to keep rubber roller calendar inventory at binding machine-II and to eliminate redundant operation of rotation rubber roller after the binding process is completed. This will improve the productivity by 33% and 49% for binding machine-I and binding machine-II respectively.