Performance improvement in a manufacturing plant using simulation

Simulation is commonly used to design manufacturing systems or to improve their performances. PROMODEL, which is one of the leading simulation programs currently used in manufacturing industries, is applied in a manufacturin firm namely, MIKES. In the thesis, a new project which requires allocation of various resources in the manufacturing plant and will be incorporated into the existing work in 2012 is modelled with PROMODEL. In the application, the new project is modelled before and after improvement so that the affects of proposed improvements can be analyzed. The project before improvement is designed by manufacturing engineers based on their previous experience. The system for the project then is directly operated without any considerations for performance such as efficiency or utilization of resources. In this study, the system before improvements will be taken as a base system and and various improvements are performed on resources such as work stations, storage areas and labour. The performance of the system after improvements will be compared with the base one using PROMODEL. The study shows proposed improvements increase the utilization of resources leading reduced numbers of reasource.The MIKES management found the results very satisfactory and decided to implement the proposed improvements.