Riveter Machine Reconditioning for Output Capacity Increase

Abstract

The ability to ramp up or down production in order to quickly respond to customers’ demand is a necessity in today’s competitive lean manufacturing environments. Output capacity bottlenecks forces manufacturing plants to meet customer peaks in demand by stacking up their inventory levels. The production output capacity of the second stage of a 2-stage manufacturing cell was identified as a bottleneck and a plan was devised to double its capacity by reconditioning an unused defective riveter machine. After a multi-disciplinary team was deployed to tackle all identified problems, the riveter was placed in production, effectively doubling the output capacity of the cell. Also, new opportunities were identified for further increasing capacity in the future. Key Terms ⎯ flexible flow shop, parallel machines, manufacturing, reliability centered maintenance, scheduling.