Publication Date

5-2024

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

John Khouryieh, Osama Mansour, Fatemah Orooji

Degree Program

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Degree Type

Master of Science

Abstract

Oftentimes, manufacturing companies concentrate on improving the production processes and neglecting other processes like purchasing, IT, quality control, etc. Just like production processes, uncontrolled and non-optimized of any of these processes could be main reasons of product defects, late deliveries, and high costs. Recently, an automotive OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) in the southeastern United States faces difficulties in performing quality control operations in a way that matches the production pace. This inadequacy has increased due to changes in customer requirements and launches a new assembly line for a new customer. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to apply Lean Six Sigma methodology to reduce the turnaround time of the welding verification process by eliminating non-value-added activities. The researcher utilized DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analysis, Improve, and Control) approach to optimize the welding verification process. Through collecting the turnaround time and analyzing welding lab process, the researcher was able identify the redundant activities, then the researcher utilized the Visual Basic for Application (VBA) programming language for Microsoft Excel to streamline the reporting welds results step. The turnaround time of the weld verification process was reduced from 39.4 minutes to 30.4 minutes. Furthermore, the productivities of five welding lab technicians were increased by 16.4%, 20.1%, 27.55%, 40.86%, and 11.86%. Similarly, the sigma level was increased by about 1 sigma level, from 1.66 to 2.61. These results show that the process capability of the turnaround time indicates that the process became more capable, however, it is still not capable of meeting the specified requirements. Therefore, more investigations need to be performed to improve the weld verification process to increase the process capability.

Disciplines

Automotive Engineering | Engineering | Industrial Engineering | Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

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