Increase production volumes at a small, fast-growing company

Abstract

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.