Impact of Working Environment and Productivity Improvement on Assembly Line through Reduction of Down Time- A Lean Approach

Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota production system. It is an applied methodology of scientific, objective technique that cause work tasks in a process to be performed with a minimum of non-value adding activities resulting in greatly reduced wait time, queue time, move time, administrative time, and other delays. The prime objective is to evolve and test few strategies to eliminate waste on the shop floor. This work is focused on improving the productivity of the seat welding and assembly plant by reducing the down time using lean tools. The non-value added activities, which are identified in the assembly line will be eliminated using lean tools. The paper addresses the productivity improvement of a seat welding and assembly line. The goal of this paper is to identify and reduce the downtimes. An attempt has been made in this paper to present some experiences of implementing new productivity improvement strategies in a small company. The project has taken place at Faurecia Automotive Seating India located in Pune producing seat frames for Volkswagen India. In this paper, experiences with implementation of productivity improvement strategies are presented.