Increase production volumes at a small, fast-growing company
Publicerad
Författare
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
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Sammanfattning
The smart home industry is growing, and it is becoming more popular and easy to
control home appliances and lighting using a mobile phone app. Plejd is a company
that develops and manufactures products for smart home automation. It is a growing
company that, within a few months, will move to a new production facility to be
able to increase its production volumes. This master’s thesis aims to map Plejd’s
current production flow to identify and analyse areas of improvement that would
enable the company to scale up its production volume. Two research questions
have been formulated to support the purpose of the project: how is the current
production flow structured and how can changes in the current production achieve
a higher production volume.
A triangulation between literature study, qualitative methods with interviews and
observations, and quantitative methods for collecting numerical data have been used.
The literature study was conducted to get a theoretical background to the project.
Interviews, observations, and collecting numerical data were used to map Plejd’s
current state through value stream mapping. Furthermore, production capacity was
calculated to estimate how far away Plejd was from the ambition to produce 100,000
products per month.
Problems in the production were identified based on the mapping of the current
state. Subsequently, several improvements are presented focusing on reaching higher
production volumes, which are summarised in a map of the future state. The
suggestions for improvements presented in the project are; merge small operations
into stations, optimising the bottleneck in production, using overlapping of operations
to a greater extent, investing in more SMT assembly racks, and introducing standard
operating procedures for the operators. With these improvements, in combination
with investments to increase production capacity should Plejd accomplish its goal
of producing 100.000 products per month.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
Value stream mapping, Lean production, Production volume, Production capacity, Capacity calculations, Electronics production, Printed circuit board