Optimal approaches to robust design for industrial wastes

Abstract

This paper focuses on the analysis of Industrial production wastes applying robust design approaches. Past literatures on Optimum Manufacturing Strategy and Taguchi robust design were reviewed and applied to case study the Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing Company (IVM). Taguchi Robust design was implemented to optimize wastes in the Innoson vehicle manufacturing company while factorial design was implemented to establish the effects of interaction of factors at two levels (low and high). The half normal effects plot of Taguchi robust design with the design Layout show that the overproduction and excess inventory are the major wastes, with overproduction ranking highest. A detailed analysis of the firm’s production processes showed that defects, excess inventory, over-production, and over-processing are the four major wastes that are impeding IVM progress and profitability. Apart from establishing the optimum parameter setting that will ultimately lead to waste elimination in IVM, the work showed that when excess inventory is 7 the optimization is 82.3. The factorial analysis model established was found to be significant with P-value of 0.012 at 95% confidence interval. Finally this study optimized the quality characteristics using minitab 16 and design expert 8 software and established optimum parameter combinations for the control of IVM wastes.