Application of lean management concept to a frozen food manufacturing

Abstract

The objective of this research is to improve productivity of frozen cooked snow crab production line. The manufacture of Combination (200g) product was chosen because its productivity yield was the least comparing to other product families. The average of current productivity before process improvement was 60 batches a day.

Lean tools and techniques were applied to improve the productivity in this research. Value stream mapping was used as a methodology which consists of four steps; selecting product family, drawing a current state map, developing a future state map, and constructing a work plan. The product characteristic, customer’s values, and production processes of Combination (200g) product were analyzed in the product family selection step. The necessary information of current production was gathered and analyzed using current state mapping, observation, spaghetti diagram, questionnaire, and interview. From these, the problems in the current production were analyzed by using cause and effect diagram. After the analysis of current production was completed, the future state map was developed to visualize the improved production line. In addition, the work plan was established in order to transform the current production line to be the designed one.

The results shows that the daily productivity is improved by 10%, 66 batches. In the meantime, the total cycle time and lead time are reduced to 2,908.87 seconds (7.58% improvement) and 1.804 days (28.33% improvement) respectively.