Rubber flipper unloading system

Abstract

A Brandix hanger (Pvt) Ltd is one of factory in Brandix group which is a large scale hanger manufacturing factory in Sri Lanka. The main production of the factory is hangers. The current production is 4 million hangers per month. However the monthly demand is around 5.5 Million hangers per month. The key concern for this research is to increase the production of the hanger manufacturing at Brandix Hangers (Pvt) Ltd to cater the current market demand.

However the purchasing of new advanced machine was very expensive and at the same time increasing the number of labour was also not a good option. Therefore by using the existing machines and labour the production had to be increased. The rubber lever machine was selected as the best option to increase the production rate by replacing the human interaction with any other effective method. The main concern was given to minimize wasting time and decrease the cycle time. To improve the production, human interaction should be replaced or should need to be speed up. However speed up of the human has a maximum limit and it is impossible to increase more than that. So by replacing the human activity with any other method, the cycle time can be minimized. Therefore automate some function of human process was identified as one of the best solution to decrease the cycle time and hence cater the market demand.

Rubber lever machine loading and unloading processes were done by human. If the automation is introduced for the loading process, the image processing technology has to be used because the placement of the flipper levers is very important factor to follow the next steps. However the image processing equipment was very expensive and could not bear it within the available budget. The other option was to automate the unloading process. Since the placement was not a very important factor for the unloading process (this was the end of the process and only the removal of the complete product was done) not needed image processing technology. On the other hand the longest time was taken for loading. Since the loading process cannot be automated to minimize the loading time the manual input should have to be increased. For that the unloading operator was transferred to the loading process. Hence the loading time becomes half.