Performance improvement of foundry through lean methodology: A modelling & simulation approach

Lean manufacturing is a business model and it is oriented towards the collection of tactical methods that emphasize eliminating non-value added activities while delivering quality products on time at minimum cost with greater efficiency. The lean manufacturing paradigm has been used extensively in industrial sectors like automobile industry, where its assembly lines of components present better adaptability to the lean concepts. This paper starts with the proposition of applying lean manufacturing concepts in production processes, and contributes a lot to turn corporations more competitive. A System Dynamics (SD) based model has been developed for optimization of resources. The objective of this paper is to design the lean techniques for the foundry, to study the impact of lead time, shipment time, and correlation time on the throughput of the core shop and melt & mould shop, and also, on plant ready-for-dispatch (RFD) and dispatch section. The SD model developed through this research would serve the purpose of studying the influence of lead time, shipment time and correlation time to identifying the specific factors, which need to be controlled so as to enhance the plant efficiency.