Simulation and Process Improvements of a Golf Cart Manufacturing Line

The manufacturing line at Textron Specialized Vehicles in Augusta, Georgia is in production nineteen hours a day over two shifts assembling golf carts to fulfill customer orders. In the ideal performance of the current state, 330 cars would be produced in a shift based on the takt time, but because of work stoppages it produces a mean of 240 cars per shift. The authors were asked to analyze the current state of the assembly line and provide suggestions for improvements to increase the capability of the line by fifty percent. This would enable the company to increase the production rate in order to meet demand better and improve the profitability of the company. The team created a digital simulation of the current status of the production line to use in modeling the affects of proposed improvements for implementations; Simio Simulation Software was used to model the 27 workstations of the production line. The distributions implemented for the each of the workstations were the aggregate of the different failure types which could result in a line stoppage and, since the entire production line is on a single continuous creep track, a downtime event at one station would stop the progress of the line at every other station. The data regarding part consumption included the time it takes to for the fulfillment team to deliver parts, the number of parts which are delivered at a time, and the number of parts required per vehicle. These distributions were created using historical data provided by the client for the past several months. The addition of multiple workstations was found to increase the number of cars produced per shift by a mean of 7.31 cars and making an adjustment to workstation seventeen to double the time between overcycle failures decreases total failures per shift by a mean of 17.43.