Assessment of the New 8-piece Pallet Welding Process

A certain manufacturing plant is in the business of manufacturing plastic products majority of which are crates and pallets. After molding, pallet parts are welded together using welding machines. Recently, to increase productivity and reduce costs, the pallet welding process has omitted the cutting step. A previous study was done to determine the optimal number of pallets welded per shift with the cutting process. This study compares the old process and the new process using simulation software, Arena. The result of the simulation shows a 25% improvement in terms of the number of pallets produced per shift from 180 to 226. Based on the worker utilization of the process, there are some workers who are underutilized; therefore one option is to do line balancing. Based on the results of the line balancing, one worker can be removed by combining the job of two workers. The combination of the job of the two results to an increase in the worker utilization without compromising the amount of pallets produced.