Development of solutions to reduce variability in material flow at a factory

This thesis focuses on improving the flow of material in an analytical instrument company, the Waters Corporation. One main pain point experienced at Waters is an observed uneven distribution in when instruments were completed throughout the work week. In addition, limitations in the number of instruments that can be transported between the assembly area and the packaging department and packaged in a given work day resulted in the formation of a bottleneck at the site of transportation (a inter-floor conveyor belt). These limitations result in an inability to package and deliver all instruments produced within a given work week, causing a backlog of unpackaged instruments which spill over into the next work week. The aim of this project is to identify and develop solutions to the underlying issues causing the uneven material flow and bottleneck. From the investigation, I identified two causes of the uneven flow.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Robyn Wen-Yi.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stephen C. Graves.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130721

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/130721