A product design for cabinet hinges assembly of San Wee Plastic Products Manufacturing

• Main Authors: Chan, Bryan Jefferson B., Suarez, Jorel Leonardo F., Sy, Loren Felix T.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2018
• Subjects: Plastics; San Wee Plastic Products Manufacturing Corp
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/9648
• Institution: De La Salle University

San Wee Plastic Products was founded by Mr. Wilson Tan, a Chinese entrepreneur who left Mainland China in search of a better life and found it in the Philippines. He initially established the company in 1995 which is now located in 945 Sitio Malinis St., Valenzuela, Metro Manila. The said company creates 3-dimensional plastic products in the form of plastic furniture such as chest drawers and cabinet closet, and in the form of plastic household products such as kitchenware, kitchen cabinets, food keepers, containers, and other small plastic items. Through the years, the company's desire for continuous sales growth year in and year out paved its way to an expansion in the year 2005. The company bought the lot next to it and established a bigger plant 2. This now is its current manufacturing facility for producing majority of its items and it houses majority of the main departments. This study focuses on the cabinet hinges assembly department of San Wee Plastic Products. For the period January to December 2017, the company experienced a deviation in the current output level vs the required output level due to the low serving capacity of the plastic hinge assembly department. Plastic cabinets have a deviation of around 4.6% between the actual production level to the demand level of the company whole other plastic items produced by the company have 6.8% deviation. The actual production of plastic cabinets hinges for the company is 6,941,123 units per year while the required output is 7,128,576 units. This translates to an unmet amount of 187,453 hinges annually. It was also found out in the study that the annual opportunity cost computed based from the unmet demand volume of all plastic items amounts to Php17,242,180.92. Another problem discovered in the cabinet hinges assembly is the physical hazard that the workers experience due to the existing assembly tool that they are using. Based on the observation made by the researchers, the average rapid upper limb assessment (RULA) scores for the left and right sides of the worker's bodies are 3.6 and 5.4, respectively. This means that workers have a medium risk of acquiring musculoskeletal disorders from the nature of their work. Pain and discomfort survey is also used in this study to validate RULA scores gathered. In order to identify the areas of improvement, house of quality is used as the tool to evaluate worker needs. Using Pareto analysis, the researchers decided to solve these six customer requirements: smaller lead time, low learning curve, safe to use, lessen fatigue, comfort, and connectability. There are three alternative designs generated to meet the worker needs. However, only the best design is chosen using mechanical advantage values of those designs. This criterion is used to make sure that the chosen design has the least required input force for the workers to assemble the three components of the plastic cabinet hinges. The chosen machine design to improve the current assembly process is fabricated in a local machine shop. This machine would improve the process time of a cabinet hinge to 7.1920 seconds for the current processing time of 8.90 seconds. This translates to an increase of 1,650,810 units of cabinet hinges annually which would save up to Php3,748,300.21 of opportunity cost to the company. With this machine implemented to the assembly production, the company would spend Php360,000 for the initial year and Php155,612.70 for each of the succeeding three years. However, it would generate an additional Phpp3,748,300.20 for each year due to the reduction of the opportunity cost. The net present value of this solution is computed to be at Php8,575,355.02.