REDUCING WORK IN PROCESS INVENTORY TO IMPROVE BUSINESS PERFORMANCE
Author(s):
Arun Rane
Author Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues College of Engineering, Mumbai 400050, India
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
Abstract
The material must roll and should not be stagnant. Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing believes in zero inventories. Practically it is not possible to keep Work in Process inventory (WIP) zero due to perturbations in manufacturing and logistics. Albeit WIP has reduced from months to days to hours, some plants still have huge WIP. This report analyses the data for the WIP inventory collected from Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in reputed tyres manufacturing plant. Brainstorming, Why-Why analysis, Pareto analysis, Fishbone diagram was conducted. It was identified that there are uneven production rates, overproduction, over-stocking of raw materials, and failure to strictly adhere to the Pull and First-In-First-Out (FIFO) system. By using JIT, locating bottlenecks, upgrading, organizing, and coordinating, WIP was reduced from 3.2 days’ worth to 3 days’ worth.
KEYWORDS:
Work-In-Process (WIP) inventory, Just-in-Time (JIT), Pull-push, Bottleneck.