WORKSHOP TYPE IN A FACTORY WITH HIGH PRODUCTION FLEXIBILITY

TRANSITION FROM MANUFACTURING TO CELL PRODUCTION: A SIMULATION MODEL

Koray KILINÇ

Erciyes University, Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences

Master Thesis, June 2018

Advisor: Prof. Dr. Banu SOYLU

SUMMARY

Workshop type manufacturing is a frequently preferred manufacturing system due to the flexibility it provides in facilities where product variety is high and production quantities are low. In this study, a battery production facility that produces with a workshop type manufacturing system is discussed. With the increase in demand for certain products in recent years, production speed and efficiency have started to be as important as flexibility in the factory, which needs to produce in high quantities. In this direction, a hybrid manufacturing system design including cellular and flow type manufacturing systems has been carried out in a way that will enable a certain product group to be produced in a shorter time. In order to determine the order of the basic workstations in the production system discussed in the first part of the study, some basic plant planning techniques were used in order to determine the order of the planned production line. This station sequence obtained was used in the design of the new production line. The existing system and the new designed production line have been virtualized using the Arena program. With the data obtained from the simulation models, bottlenecks caused by factors such as waiting, transportation, insufficient human and machine resources were determined. Improvement suggestions for the solution of the identified problems were modeled with different scenarios and a cumulative improvement trend was achieved. At the end of the study, the benefits of the improvement activities to the facility in question and to other businesses with similar manufacturing systems were evaluated.