The Application Of Lean Manufacture In Escalator Assemble Lines

Company A puts Lean manufacturing in practice to eliminate waste andreduce production cost for full the requirement of company development.The paper identifies the waste in the manufacture process activities byusing Value Stream Mapping technology according to the escalator produceflow status in workshop, also measuring the operations time and the standardworking time and production time by job measurement way. It is found thatthe produce line is unbalances for most of the efficiency is low and some areabout 60% by researching original the operations arrangement. At end ofarticle,working procedure analysis method is used to study the WIP andtransportation of each work station. It is realized that some transportations arenon-value activity and should be eliminated because its waiting time is so longand some of them takes up about 50% production time.The paper makes a set of producing plan by tools of IE and Leanmanufacture to optimize the assembly line. First, escalator departmentimproves the process flow. It is used that ECRS (Eliminate, Combine,Rearrange, and Simplify) and 5W2H methods to reduce waiting time of WIPand eliminate unnecessary transportation. Waiting time is reduced 50% afterimprovement. Second, it is increased the employee average usage efficiencyfrom 76% to 90% through optimizing operations and balancing assembly lines Third, the workshop layout is amended to help for optimizing working produce. The efficiency is increased by eliminating and combination,optimizing and improving job processing, the work way is changed from"escalator fixing and works moving"to"works fixing and escalator moving". At same time, the seeing board and just-in-time system insure the process is visible and in-time. At Last, it is summarized the improvement result and make improved the VSM in the paper.After Lean manufacture is bought into effect, produce system reduces the lead time to 60%, improve process cycle efficiency to 157%, the capacity increase to 121%. Lean manufacture project of escalator assemble line is a good start of the continuous improvement process and establishes the basis of Lean manufacture actualization in the whole company.