Optimizing the production line using Monte Carlo method for Jimma Industrial Park; case of medium scale shoes factory.

Abstract

This thesis was carried out in Jimma Industrial Park of medium scale shoes factory. The aim with this thesis is to increase the production line performance accordingly minimize the waiting time. Production line is often associated with large volumes of production as the line of each station in the manufacturing process. The characteristic of that line have a specific number of machines are linked to some form of equipment handling or transporting. This production line plant layout have indicate that some gaps, that gaps are between exist output performance and expected production capacity have critical problems, because now a day there are several competition among this type of manufacturers. So, this study is to optimize the production line using Monte Carlo method to evaluate the performance of exist production line with new model. As a result, the model's output shows that the stations' relatively under-performance rates from 154.6% to 200%. The probability distribution of each station with their corresponding production capacity is Uniform, Binomial, or Negative binomial. The company have beneficial after improving their production line by developing a new model through optimizing techniques. This improvement would reduce operating cost and maintenance cost. It also brings additional benefits increasing in both profit and productivity as a whole. Overall, optimizations have to be undertaking on the whole factory production line to improve the production plant layout and their performance