Study of the Modules Line at Vishay Semiconductor Italiana S.p.A. - Development of a predictive model to estimate Direct Labour needs and critical analysis of the production line

In a context of rapid growth in terms of demand, this work arises from the need to estimate the necessary workforce to produce a certain volume of a specific product and as a consequence, the associated Direct Labour cost. Meanwhile, the study is also focused on identifying the process critical issues, such as bottlenecks, and suggesting possible solutions in order to increase productivity and make process capacity meet with the increasing demand. The analysis is based on direct observation: all productive phases were divided into elementary sub-operations whose duration and frequency were measured. The direct observation of every part number allowed to define which parameters affect the operator time and therefore, develop a predictive model able to return the Direct Labour required for producing existing and new products. Moreover, the comparison of operator and machine times enabled to identify the bottleneck of each productive phase and of the whole process. The most relevant conclusion is that, despite the big variety of components in product layouts, there is a small difference in terms of requested operator time. Another interesting fact that emerges from the analysis is that most part of operator tasks are non-value-added activities which need to be reduced (or better eliminated) in a Lean perspective. In addition, the study focuses on the fact that the production line is unbalanced and proposes corrective actions. Finally, the presence of inefficiencies is highlighted since in several production phases, the average production per work-shift does not correspond with the capacity. On this point, further analysis should be conducted to better understand the inefficiency causes.