Debottlenecking of a Batch Tire compound production "Case Study: Tire Compound Manufacturing"

Abstract

Global competitive pressures are causing organization to fmd ways better to meet the needs of their customer, to reduce cost, and increase productivity. In batch plants, when trying to increase armual capacity, bottlenecks faced and as every production line have one or more bottleneck areas that limit overall performance. Each of these production limitations will add up to give a larger cumulative negative effect - on machine speed and on •overall process efficiency. Those bottlenecks limit the amount of production produced. In case of tire, compound mixing bottlenecks limit the number of batches that can process per production period. In this work, bottleneck analysis and capacity studies present in order to identify and improve equipment and work setup related bottlenecks of the batch production line. The study prioritized the problem solutions, and plotted a clear, cost effective course toward the elimination of those bottlenecks in batch processing and explained the strategies for eliminating them. The debottlenecking decision-making process based on a set of operation-related variables that used to indicate the presence of bottlenecks and hence constructing an effective counter measure. The implementation of the suggested methodologies demonstrated with the use of a Banbury -rubber mixing-example at January 2008.