Cellular manufacturing model to reduce WIP fluctuation in garment manufacturing Online publication date: Wed, 02-Dec-2009
by Vijitha Ratnayake, Gamini Lanarolle, Chandana Perera, James Marsh
International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage (IJSSCA), Vol. 5, No. 4, 2009
Abstract: The labour productivity in the Sri Lankan garment industry is found to be rather low compared with that of some of its competitive countries. On-site investigation revealed that the workflow becomes unbalanced due to many reasons despite it being balanced at the beginning of a style change. The significance of the problem of high work in progress and its high fluctuation is investigated through the data collected from 42 garment manufacturing lines in 14 different factories. Hypothesis testing on these data revealed that this is a common problem. Root cause analysis on work in progress fluctuation disclosed the major contributing factors to the problem. Identifying each sewing line in few 'sub cells', where a team of operators focuses mainly on one part of the garment, helped when addressing most of the problems identified in the root cause analysis. The sub-cell concept was successfully implemented in a garment manufacturing company in Sri Lanka.
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