Improvement of plastic roll change process on primary packing machine using Lean and Six Sigma approaches

Abstract

Continuous improvement process is a tradition of method improvement focusing the elimination of waste in all systems and process in an organisation. Continuous improvement has been an important part of manufacturing history since the humans are always looking for a better way to do their jobs or improve their tools. The current problem happened are the operator need to change the plastic roll average in a day about 3.667 times in operation hour and each time of change take about 3 minute. More than that, every time of plastic roll change, there will have a waste average about 32 of empty pack due to machine setup. The purposes of this improvement project are to reduce the number of plastic roll change process by used the lean six sigma approach on primary packaging machine. In order to identifying the defect, the Six Sigma approach has been used through its DMAIC method. For the improvement phase of this project, the Lean Manufacturing approach has been applied. The result after the improvement shows that the number of plastic roll change reduce from 3.667 to 3 times only and from the 3 times plastic roll change, there only 2 times of change are in operation hour and the other 1 are out of operation hour. The numbers of empty pack waste also shows the improvement from the current are 1366.06 pack to 465 pack. From the result, it shows the successful of applying Lean Six Sigma in way to get the minimum number of defect and at the same time increase the productivity.