Productivity Improvement of Protection Release Assembly Line

Abstract

In the present scenario of the manufacturing competitive world, industries are continuously working hard for increasing their productivity to survive in the market. With these, they aim to provide more economical, durable and reliable product to their customers as well as make the most from it. For this, continuous improvement approaches as well as quick solution of the problem on the assembly line is one of their significant requirement. In the present project-work, study is undertaken at a switchgear manufacturing company to increase the productivity of the Protection Release assembly line, a product used in MCCB. DMAIC methodology is used to investigate prime causes for occurrence of the defects on the assembly line and processes are improved to eliminate the occurrence of them. To achieve this, Pareto analysis and control charts are used to measure the current level of performance and productivity goals are set. Further, analyses is carried out using techniques such as cause and effect diagram and why-why approach to find the root causes of the defects. During the improvement phase, required checkpoints and fixtures as well as gauges are included in current assembly process. This has been made standard procedure in the assembly line which in turn reduces the assembly errors and testing defects. Further, duration of heating and cleaning for electromagnet cores are finalized using combinations of various parameters. Also, a set of experiments with varying grinding parameters are carried out to achieve the surface roughness (Ra) range suitable for the correct functioning of the protection release. Minitab Software is used for analysis of data.