Manufacturing engineering practices in the metal fabrications sector of Ghanaian industry

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to find out manufacturing engineering (ME) practices in the metals sector of the Ghanaian industry. The paucity of such works in the literature means that the real state of ME practice is largely unknown, despite the fact that it remains an indispensable support function to industry. ME involves design and specification of tooling, production processes, process planning and technical problemsolving. Following ME principles make it far more likely that products will meet their design specifications and made within the estimated cost and time. In this study the practice of ME is investigated using a questionnaire sent to 50 sampled metal processing firms in three major cities but returned by 25 of them. Thirteen of them are from Kumasi, 5 from Tema, and 7 from Accra. Data gathered were analysed using descriptive statistics including graphs. Comparisons were also made with global best practice found in the literature. The results suggest that the classical functions of ME are being practiced to various degrees in the firms studied. However, production facilities employed are mostly of the conventional type and equipment such as computer numerical control machines (CNCs), industrial robots, automated material handling systems, and flexible manufacturing systems are not in place. By this absence, many advantages of CNC and other automated production machine tools such as higher precision and repeatability, greater flexibility, reduced cutting and idle times etc., are missed by metal processing firms in Ghana. Further, firms do not use any computer systems for design/manufacturing, a situation that can only be bad for competitiveness and growth, because computer aided design (CAD) and manufacturing systems, including computer aided process planning, accelerate the design process to integrate it with manufacturing by eliminating artificial barriers that lead to long lead-times. In addition 40% of respondent firms retain manufacturing engineers who do not contribute to Design for Manufacture (DFM) or Design for Assembly. This confirms a major factor responsible for a reported low rate of new product introduction; moreover, where manufacturing engineers do offer some contribution to DFM, they do not consciously have product innovation in mind as a target goal, a situation which can best be described as unprogressive.

Keywords: Metal processing, manufacturing engineering, practices, Ghana