Abstract

In today’s competitive market, companies must work closely with their customers and suppliers if they want to survive and improve their own performance and provide a better response to market forces. In a typical supply chain, information flows are more important than the other two involved flows including material flow and cash flow. It can be lead to enhance organizational knowledge. The main purpose of the research is to identify, analyze and improve the performance level of an assembly line using simulation techniques. Many factors, such as setup time, assembly equipment adjustment, operating time, failure rate, repair rate, and production rate, can lead to non-stationary data; therefore, in order to analyze such complicated systems, it is necessary to apply simulation techniques. This study examined the most important performance features of an assembly line including bottlenecks, manufacturing cycle time, buffers capacities, and the number of finished products in a given time period. After data gathering, and designing a simulation model, the simulation experiments were done with Enterprise Dynamic software. The simulated model is implemented and tested against real-world data and is demonstrated by a numerical example. Then, the bottlenecks and performance measures including throughput time and waiting time are identified and analyzed in order to develop a new scenario in which opportunities for improvements are presented. The results show significant improvements in terms of reducing waiting time in queue and increasing manufacturing efficiencies