The measures to improve the manufacturing process by using the lean concept for hard disk drive industry

Abstract

In this paper, the lean manufacturing method using value stream mapping was adopted to investigate and analyst the value of activities throughout production processes in order to eliminate the production wastes. While the simulation technique was used to support decision for proposing measures to increase a firm productivity in the case study, a hard disk drive component manufacturer. The results shown that the purposed method could reduce production cycle time (takt time) from 21.18 to 19.89 s., workforces from 10 to 8, work-in-process about 60% and eliminate production bottleneck. That led to more efficiency (12.19% increase) in production line balancing, indicating more effective production lines. Furthermore, improvement of production process continued progressively in the step of adhesive dispensing and the one of drying the glue by UV light. It led to ability to control the amount of glue dispensing more effectively, increasing quantity of work (33%) (from one syringe of glue) from 3,078 into 4,104 pieces of work per syringe, and reducing cost of glue (25%).