Enhancing Efficiency and Organizational Knowledge in Assembly Lines Using Discrete-event Simulation Techniques

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 to provide a better response to market forces. In a typical supply chain, information flow is 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, analyse and improve the performance of an assembly line using simulation techniques. Many factors, such as setup time, operating time, failure rate, repair rate, and production rate, can cause data to be non-stationary. Therefor, in order to analyse such complicated systems it is necessary to apply simulation techniques. The most important properties of an assembly line including bottlenecks, cycle time, buffers capacities, and the number of finished products in a given time period are investigated in the research. After data gathering, and building an appropriate simulation model, the simulation experiments were done with Enterprise Dynamic software. The simulation model is implemented and tested against real-world data and is demenostrated by a numerical example. Then, the bottlenecks and performance measures including throughput time and waiting time are identified and analysed 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 and increasing efficiencies.