IMPROVEMENT OF OVERALL EQUIPMENT EFFECTIVENESS OF BARREL PRE-HONING MACHINE LINE

Greeshma Anup, Pooja A.V, M. Varsha Machaiah, Tejas P. Govekar, A. Balakrishna

Abstract: Bosch Group is one of the leading global supplier of technology and services. The company was established in Stuttgart in the year 1886 by Robert Bosch a leading industrialist (1861-1942) as “Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering.” Bosch Limited located at Adugodi, Bangalore manufactures one of the components of the diesel engine called an Element. It is made up of the assembly of two parts called the Barrel and the Plunger. When the plunger is inserted into the barrel, it creates a pressure drop in the pump which is used to inject the fuel into the engine. This paper reports the current Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and its improvement in the Barrel Pre-honing Machine Line, which is a process involved in the manufacture of a barrel. Improvement of the OEE is beneficial to improve the productivity. The scope of the project was to collect data to calculate the current OEE and create improvements. The project undertaken involved identifying the bottleneck area and eliminating the bottleneck. To do this, the Takt time chart of the various processes involved in the manufacture of the barrel was analyzed. The bottleneck was identified to be the Pre-Honing line which consisted of 12 machines. Preliminary analysis was carried out on the Pre-Honing line of barrels to obtain the current state data for the month of January and February. Graphical analysis of the collected data showed that two machines in particular had relatively lower OEE of the 12 machines. Any improvement on these two machines would lead to increased production, eliminating the bottleneck. Hence these two machines in particular were chosen as the subject of study. Thus the project aims at reducing Availability, Performance and Quality losses of the machines using SFMC (Shop Floor Management Cycle). Shop floor management cycle is a procedural system developed by Bosch to improve the Overall Equipment Efficiency in the troublesome process and hence the production and productivity. The identification of the bottleneck is done through Takt chart and then hourly monitoring is used to identify the losses. Further this data is analyzed to obtain the root causes of the problem. These causes are subjected to critical analysis, validated and appropriate actions are taken to reduce or eliminate them. The SFMC concepts include tracking all the activities that take place in the machine line. This includes creating a Takt time chart, maintaining hourly monitoring sheet, OEE tracking, creating a Pareto chart of the losses, problem solving (Ishikawa Diagram, 5-why) and PDCA sheet. The Hone Holder Tracking Sheet was designed and implemented to reduce the availability losses due to non-availability of hone holder sets. On implementation, the OEE of the line was improved from 70 to 84%.

Keywords: Bosch Limited, Overall Equipment Effectiveness, OEE, TPM, SFMC

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2016.0528008