Application of Discrete Event Simulation for Production Line Performance Evaluation

Simulation, in particular discrete event simulation, has still not gain industries wide acceptance as decision support tool for performance evaluation. This study intends to provide the example of the application of discrete event simulation in evaluating performance of a production line. The data was collected from an electronic manufacturing company’s production line and the simulation model is built using ProModel simulation software. After validating the model and running the simulation, the result is obtained. The finding shows that the workers in the production line is underutilized and the bottleneck is detected at the inspection machine which has cause a higher manufacturing lead time. We suggest that these problems can be overcome by merging several tasks together to reduce the number of workers and increasing the capacity of the inspection machine. This study shows an another example of the benefits of simulation knowledge to manufacturing organization and its application in industry should be encouraged. Keywords— simulation technique; discrete event simulation; production line performance