The modelling and simulation on burger production process: a case study in small and medium industry

This simulation study focuses on burger production process runs by a SMI (small and medium industry) located in Kedah. The aim of this study is to develop the current production line of the company in order to observe the performance of the system and then suggest the methods for improvement. The efficiency of the current system including the utilization of workstations and workers are estimated from the simulation result. The outputs of simulation are compared with the actual data for validity of the simulation model. This study enables the observation of Queuing Theory application in discrete-event simulation. Queuing Theory is used to develop the mathematical model of the production line. Based on the results from current simulation model, bottleneck of the system is identified. As the company plans to increase the production, therefore an improvement model is built to forecast the possible outcome of the increasing production capacity. The proposed actions are adding another machine at bottleneck point and adding more workers for speeding up the manual tasks. By adding the machine, the structure of multiple server queuing model is observed. The results from the improvement model shows 92%achievement from the targeted output whenever the machine is added. By increasing the number of workers, the total of finish product also increases with 98% from the target. Therefore, it can be concluded that the company is able to increase the production capacity by doing few adjustment on the current burger production system. From the study, methods to improve the production line and increase the production rate are identified where they need to add another forming machine and more workers to speed up the tasks.