Análise e identificação dos gargalos de produção de gelatina em torno das metas de produção

Abstract

The term “bottleneck” is used to describe the bottleneck in any production system. In this system, there may be operations, machines, tasks that can be characterized as a limiting factor of this process, reventing greater performance. Making use of tools that investigate and identify these bottlenecks allows making decisions that help increase the productivity of a given process, so that not necessarily the whole process needs to be changed, but only the points where the bottleneck was identified. (Goldratt and Cox, 1984). The bottleneck theme is quite recurrent in the practice and theory of production management because knowing how to analyze the theme accurately allows an increase in yield in the production system, that is, the rate at which the system generates money through the sale of the product. The bottleneck situation can cause unnecessary inventory, prolonging manufacturing lead times (Kralová and Leporis, 2010). In general, any element present in the production system can be the bottleneck (equipment, labor, plant layout, operational failures, decision-making errors, etc.) and not necessarily the bottleneck is something fixed, it can be an operating point that changes daily or that it doesn't happen often. Having knowledge of tools that help identify bottlenecks, specific ecommendations can be made to improve the production system effectively. The problem to be discussed concerns a general case study, where the context of the problem is a gelatin factory that have daily production goals depending on the type of protocol adopted for the day. The plant's production system is composed of several unit operations and the mass flow of some crucial points of the system in a given month will be analyzed, in order to identify the main bottlenecks that made it impossible for the production goals to be achieved. The operations that will be analyzed are those of extraction, centrifugation, filtration, ultrafiltration, deionization, evaporation, sterilization and drying, so that they configure operations with greater possibilities of production losses. Still in the context of production of the factory in question, daily the supervisors responsible for production, make notes, in the form of reports, of why the goals were not reached. These notes are based on the TPS (Toyotism Production System) where each possible aggravating factor (which caused loss of production) is divided into categories. The categories are: reliability, operability, utilization, and availability. These categories serve to guide the main problems of the plant and consequently direct what can be the bottleneck depending on the incidence of problems faced in the production line (Liker and Meier, 2007). Even with the application of the TPS method in order to characterize the problems in general categories of losses, the monitoring of the factory's production system is still difficult to analyze due to the number of unit operations in the production line, as well as, as it is a purely continuous process, with only stops scheduled, it is not always possible to identify what caused the loss of production nor in which part of the process this loss occurred. Therefore, a more effective analysis is needed for better understanding, thus identifying bottlenecks in the process.