Line Balancing and Layout Model for Productivity Improvement in Leather Footwear Industry

Abstract

The government of Ethiopia considers the leather footwear industry as one of the priority sector that is capable of accelerating economic development by creating more employment opportunities. However, the industry's contribution to the national economy so far is not enjoyable as productivity of the industry is much lower qualitatively, quantitatively and value-wise. The focal constraint against performance of the industry is the existence of bottleneck process in the production line. The major ones are pile up of 'UPPER' (i.e. upper part of a shoe) at some points, because of unequal workload distribution among workstations. Accordingly, the main objective of this study is to improve the production line efficiency through line balancing technique that is demonstrated by taking Peacock shoe factory as a case study. The study considered 'Bades shoe model' to investigate the production line in the Stitching department. Data were collected through direct data intake from the shop-floor activities and company's database. A well-prepared templates and stopwatch were used for the data collection. The analysis was carried out through the logic of modular system. This system uses work sharing method in which cross-trained workers perform multiple tasks to eliminate bottleneck processes and balance workloads among workstations. Furthermore, the study proposed a layout model to balance the production line. The results suggest that the production line efficiency is improved from 68.89% to 87.6%, and the labor productivity is increased from 16.67 to 23.44. The findings provide important insights into productivity improvements by creating smooth flow of components in assembly lines.