Assembly line balancing using simulation technique in a garment manufacturing firm

Abstract

The typical problems facing with garment manufacturing are: short product cycle for fashion articles, long production lead time, bottlenecking, and low productivity. To alleviate the problems, different types of line balancing techniques have been used for many years in the garment industry. However, garment industries which are based on manual-operations oriented system do not still gain significant results with the techniques and difficult to forecast future events when they want to change or modify the production system. The objective of this paper is to develop a simulation model which represent real production process scenarios of garment products that helps to identify the bottlenecks and enhance production system performance. The study has considered basic polo-shirt to investigate and demonstrate the application of simulation technique. For this purpose, in 2009, data are collected from real system (AAYSC-Knit wear garment in Ethiopia) and different alternative systems have been considered in order to find the best one.

Keywords: Line balancing, simulation technique, garment manufacturing firms