A simulation study for fire extinguisher manufacturing process layout design

This article provides a case study for a fire extinguisher manufacturing company in North America that has been building a new facility in Mexico to benefit from North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and low production cost. The company utilized a value stream mapping to finalize its new facility’s manufacturing process design, and divided the process into several groups, some of which were being developed by contracted vendors. The powder fill operation was one of those vendor-developed systems. However its current layout design experienced the deadlock problem during the capacity test. To overcome this problem, the project team designed two other layouts an express lane layout and an independent zone layout. The team used both an analytical approach and a simulation approach to evaluate all three alternatives including the current layout in terms of the number of pallets and capacity. The simulation study revealed that the independent zone layout (IZL) could satisfy the capacity requirement without any deadlock. However, the express lane layout (EZL), initially thought to be an alternative to the current layout, turned out to be infeasible. Through this case study, the team realized the importance and usefulness of the simulation-based design particularly when developing a new system. If it had been applied earlier before developing the actual system, it would have saved more time and cost. The team also realized that the diverse “what-if” analysis in the simulation could provide significant improvement in the design factors affecting the system performance.