Improvement of Material Flow in the Production and Supply Chain of ...

the first one.
For the third solution, it obviously needs more investment comparing to the first two
solutions. However if the market requirement much more than the forecast, this is the
mothball plan. The cost of reduce repair time is also difficult to estimate in the forth
solution. But the cost to employ more workers can be calculated. In the Swedish law the
average salary is 110 SEK per hour. The shift added is the night work shift. So
supposing the average salary is 150 SEK per hour per person. The effective work time
for one shift is about five hours and one shift needs about fifteen workers. As a result
the cost is 2,587,500 per year. And this does not include the cost to reduce the repair
time. The cost of solution four is much more than the first two solutions. The last
solution goes the same situation.
The result is when take cost as parameter among the five solutions the first and second
are similar and stand head of others. The third one is better than the last two but worse
than the first two according to the cost.
4.4.2 Reliability comparing
It is well known that the ability to analyze overall performance is critical to any
organization. When it comes to maintenance, improving effectiveness normally
includes three means: reducing downtime, reducing maintenance costs, and extending
component and asset life (Lawson, viewed 2008). In real production, an organization
must focus on sustainable results rather than just focus on cutting costs.
“Results-oriented organizations focus first on the quality and volume of production
throughput, followed closely by the cost to produce the required quality and volume.
This approach will improve reliability performance, which will drive manufacturing
costs down.” (Idhammar, viewed 2007) Many companies focus more on cutting
maintenance costs, as a result, maintenance costs cuts down temporarily, than increase
much more than the initial savings. And besides of this, reliability goes down, pave the
way for losses that can be substantial. This phenomenon has been shown many times.
The root cause of this phenomenon is often shortsightedness. (Idhammar, viewed 2007)
Among the five solutions, three of them require decrease the repair time. One way to
achieve the aim is to increase maintenance frequency, which will help the system work
in a good state. In fact there are many cases shown that maintenance costs increased and
consequently also production throughput increased steadily. And the increased cost of
maintenance is much less than the margin gained from the improvement of high
reliability. So for the three solutions, if try to cut down the repair time by investing
maintenance, the reliability will increase steadily from a low percentage to a high value.
As pre-mentioned when compare the cost of different solutions, the way to improve the
repair time is repair the broken down point as soon as possible. Since repair is a part of
maintenance, solutions try to satisfy the requirement of market at the same time
increase the reliability. In another word, it is sure that the second, third and forth
solution will improve the reliability of the production system.
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