Production Process Performance for Small-Scale Garment Enterprises in Ethiopia

Garment manufacturing enterprises in Ethiopia play an important role in job creation, economic contribution, and poverty reduction efforts. On the contrary, these enterprises have stagnant growth due to internal and external factors. Among those factors, internal factors related to the production process contribute a great share. In this research, a statistical process control tool is used to tackle the production process variations of these enterprises. Unstable and uncontrollable process variation has been identified which affects the overall production process performance and production of non-conforming products. Results showed that the process capability (Cp) index of the production process in these enterprises is less than one. This suggests that the process has high variability and is not capable of producing as per the manufacturing specifications or customer requirements. To ensure the reduction of the process variation, root causes of process variations have been identified and improvement strategies were developed. Based on the nature of business improvement models and the nature of the problems within the garment enterprises, a five-phase model has been developed. The model incorporates the key activities of business process reengineering, benchmarking, and continuous process improvement has been proposed to improve process capability and achieve continuous improvement in the production process. The proposed model can be further applied to improve the process performance of medium and large-scale garment enterprises.