Abstract
There are three major processes in footwear manufacturing factories: cutting/preparation, stitching and assembling, each process can be considered as a single production line. Among these, stitching is the most critical process because it contains many complex manufacturing processes which are not easy to be automated. A typical stitching process relies on many skilled workers to operator the stitching machines, it is the process that requires the most labors in footwear manufacturing factories. When talking to the management of stitching line, there are some issues regarding to parameters settings such as production target, batch size and human resource arrangement, etc. However, it is not easy to know which parameters setting is the optimal design for the current production line. Therefore, factory managers usually make decisions and set those parameters settings based on their past experiences. This research plans to develop a representative simulation model for footwear stitching line and justify the effect of the different parameters settings on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as output per day, Pairs Produced per Hour (PPH), cycle time and Work-In-Process (WIP) level. The simulation results show that different parameters settings do have significant impact on the KPIs, and through the techniques of experimental design, this research also identified the optimal parameters settings for the factory.