Samsung watches clock in a bid to boost productivity

Manjari Raman

New Delhi, Feb 10: At Samsung India Electronics Ltd, they are counting the seconds--literally. Early last month, the company kicked off an intense time-study exercise on the shop floor, to meet the 1999 corporate target: to manufacture 2,000 sets a day, up from the current output of 1,500 sets a day.

If that sounds simple, beware. At Samsung's Noida facility, the working time is fixed: production starts at 9 am and stops at 6 pm. In between there is a 40-minute lunch break and two tea breaks of 10 minutes each. Which means that currently, at the end of the day, it takes Samsung 480 minutes to manufacture 1,500 sets. Therefore the tact time, or the time to manufacture one set, currently, is 19.2 seconds.

The Samsung challenge? To bring tact time down to 14.4 seconds by October 1999. For only at that speed would Samsung's existing production line be capable of churning out 2,000 sets in 480 minutes. Says Gulshan Kumar Saini, assistant manager, production engineering: ``That's why we have started doing adetailed time study to measure and analyse the current loss in time at various stages of the production line.''

Currently, the Samsung line consists of three main sections--the PCB and chassis section on which there are 27 operators; the cabinet section (14 operators); and the final section (26 operators). For the past five months, a four-member time-study team meticulously stop-watched the time taken by each worker, each section, and thence the total line. The idea: track the slow segments and bottlenecks on the shopfloor, to speed up the production process. Consider how Samsung is watching the clock:

Performance loss:
At the manual component insertion stage for example, Renu's job entails inserting seven components on a PCB in a particular sequence. While Renu appears to be working steadily, there are variations between each cycle--sometimes she performs one cycle faster, sometimes slower.

``The variations within the working of each operator therefore, account for performance loss,''says Girish Shah, manager, production. To track the performance loss, one of the most basic units of time being measured at Samsung is the cycle time--or the average time taken by any operator to perform an operation over ten readings.

Balancing loss:
Samsung's PCB line consists of 15 operators working in sequence. Now, if Operator 7 is slower than the rest, he becomes a bottleneck for speedy operations-both up and down the line. So the variation between one person's working time versus another also causes a loss of time, called the balancing loss. To track the balancing loss across the Samsung production line, the team is measuring the neck time: the maximum cycle time taken by any operator in a particular section of the production line. That stage (or operator) is called the neck stage.

q Operation loss: Suppose the maximum time taken by any operator on the PCB line is 20 seconds. Theoretically, that should mean that at least after every 20 seconds a finished PCB should come off theline. Surprisingly, Samsung discovered that even that does not happen-because even if the operator finishes the job in 20 seconds, the PCB has to physically move a certain distance. Such losses of time are called transfer loss.

For this, the team continuously tracks the tact time--which is the actual time in which output is physically available during the working hours--and tries and bring it closer and closer to the target tact time of 14.4 seconds.Of course, measuring time is just the tip of the ice-berg. Since January, Samsung is now speeding up the process by: reducing neck time within a stage, or stage-to-stage balancing; and section-to-section balancing. Says Shah, ``The focus now is to eliminate waste and sub-ordinate activities.''

One sample: at 20 seconds, the horizontal-line adjustment stage was emerging as a big bottleneck. By automating some operations and readjusting the work procedures, Samsung has been able to eliminate the stage altogether-- besides shaving off eight seconds from theproduction process.

Over the next few months, the time analysis team will also begin work-element study. Which means hitherto, if an operator performed 10 tasks to complete one operation--and was measured on his cycle time--now each of the 10 sub-activities will be timed separately. So earlier if chassis assembly had one cycle time, now the Samsung team will time sub-activities like: pulling out a chassis from a box; attaching screw to the chassis; label installation; chassis installation.

That the time-analysis has paid off rich dividends is already clear: in July 1998, when the study first began, Samsung could only manufacture 1,200 sets in 480 minutes. By December 1998, production had raced to 1,500 sets a day. More important, from 85 operators, the factory is down to just 56 operators even as productivity has risen from 1,200 sets a day to 1,500 sets a day.

There are other benefits: earlier production for one Samsung CTV model would run for two days. Now, Samsung is able to run three differentmodels a day-depending on the demand-pull from consumers. Moreover, for introducing a new model, earlier, stabilisation would take up to two months: now it is down to 15 days. Says Saini: ``In January 1999 we launched seven models--and already the first two are into mass production.''

The big breakthrough however will be in October 1999--when production speed will be up to 2,000 sets a day. Interestingly, even at that level, the Samsung line will be balanced to only 85 per cent--up from the current 65 per cent. Watch out for Samsung's next countdown--in nanoseconds.

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