Establishing cycle times in a high variety manufacturing environment using DMAIC Procedure
Today many competitive manufacturing companies use a variety of quantitative metrics to provide them with the means to track and identify problems with performance, and to make good decisions. This explains the need for a weaving and dyeing plant based in Cape Town, South Africa, to establish production performance metrics in general, and the cycle times at various workstations in particular. Also, this research assumes that the establishment of the cycle times at various workstations of the weaving and dyeing plant constitutes an important step toward the adequate management of the manufacturing lead times. While there exist many generic techniques for establishing the cycle times in a manufacturing environment, there is limited literature on how to establish the cycle times in a high variety production environment, such as a weaving and dyeing plant. Consequently, this research focuses on establishing cycle times at various workstations of a weaving and dyeing plant, while taking into account the entire population of products that has to be produced at each workstation. Furthermore, following the establishment of the cycle times, this research creates a cycle time control sheet to be used by the weaving and dyeing department's managers, in order to better control the manufacturing lead times. Lastly this research identifies the DMAIC procedure as a viable quality management approach, which can be used to realign the weaving and dyeing production performance measurements with the requirements of its ISO 9001:2008 certification. Therefore DMAIC is used as the most suitable technique for carrying out this research. Stellenbosch University https:/scholar.sun.ac.za