Improvement Proposal to Increase Productivity in a Leather Footwear SME Applying 5S, SLP and standard Work. An Empirical Review.

Abstract

Throughout the years the competitiveness of the footwear sector has increased exponentially, therefore requiring an improvement in quality and the production process in SMEs. Many companies belonging to the sector normally experience problems related to the production process like low productivity, high cycle and long transfer times. For these reasons, the main objective of this research is to support a small leather footwear company for ladies located in Lima, Peru. This will be carried out through an improvement proposal using the lean tools 5S, systematic layout planning (SLP) and standard work, with the goal of proving an alternative to further the development of the footwear production process. We propose a new layout distribution to eliminate unnecessary movements and decrease times from unnecessary processes. The model being presented was validated through a simulation in the Arena software before and after the improvement, in order to verify if the implementation of the lean manufacturing tools got a positive effect in the footwear company. As a result, a decrease in transfer and value-Added times was obtained by 37.4 minutes/dozen and 199.2 minutes/dozen. Because of the time reduction, the productivity rose to 60.2% and the efficiency to 108%.