OPTIMIZATION OF PROCESS PLANNING AND CONTROL OF PLASTIC MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY

Abstract

A case study of the plastic manufacturing industry was conducted to determine the main factors affecting its production capacity. A major factor affecting production capacity in this industry was realized to be machine downtime, by the process of reducing machine downtime an optimum usage of the machine was discovered. It was found that this factor has a significant effect on improving the production capacity to optimum in this firm, a comprehensive flow chart for process planning and control was designed, via the development of a decision support system (DSS) for process planning and control of the plastic manufacturing industry located in the western part of Nigeria. The DSS developed was validated using cycle time, the weight of raw material, automatically operated the machine from the company. The weight of a unit plastic product of various sample types in the factory was determined, manually produced products in the factory were measured and recorded this same data was inputted into the decision support system developed. Results from company and DSS developed were compared using paired t-test comparison, the result showed the 2- tailed significance of 0.045; which shows that there is no major difference between the weight of each plastic product produced by the company machine and the result generated by the DSS developed this confirm the software is reliable according to weight formation of plastic product. The cost estimation t-test result shows the 2-tailed significance of 0.035, which showed that there is no much difference between the manual cost estimation result by the company and the result displayed by DSS.