A system study on the premium mattress production of Uratex Philippines, Incorporated-Valenzuela Plant

• Main Authors: Ang, Jared Constantin S., de Leon, Kayla Marie S., King, Justin John
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Mattress industry—Production control; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/18652
• Institution: De La Salle University

The premium mattress lines of Uratex Foam, which include the Premium Zipperized, Premium Tape-edge, and Super Premium lines, are deemed the most crucial and significant product lines of the company, as these collectively bring the greatest annual returns among all of the company's product lines. The Valenzuela Plant of Uratex Foam is considered the most crucial production facility by the company because it is the primary producer of premium mattress lines. Due to how important premium mattress production in the Valenzuela Plant is to Uratex, this systems study aims to assess and improve the Valenzuela Plant's premium mattress production system with respect to its system objectives. Through system appraisal of the premium mattress production line using SWOT and WOT-SURG (Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats - Seriousness, Urgency, Resources, Growth) analysis, it was determined that the most significant problem in the present system would be the occurrence of cancelled premium mattress units representing the deviation between effective capacity and actual production output. In 2016, a total of 1,178 premium mattress units were cancelled by the Bedding Department, amounting to an annual opportunity loss of Php5,301,000.00 in profit. To determine the significant causes that contribute to this problem, a Why-why diagram was constructed, and the identified causes in the diagram were validated through gathering relevant data pertaining to the causes. It was found that the presence of several inefficiencies in the Fabrication process, which was determined as the bottleneck process of the premium mattress production system, served as a primary cause of the problem. In essence, these inefficiencies in the Fabrication process constrained the line capacities of the premium mattress lines, making the system unable to produce premium mattresses at a rate sufficient in meeting the effective capacity, which in turn led to cancellations. The proposed solution included four actions to be taken in the premium mattress production system. These include adding an additional Fabrication workstation, changing the type of adhesive used from hot melt glue to the water-based Simalfa, relocating the Fabrication area to be closer to the areas of its preceding and succeeding processes and eliminating the need of trimming the excess length of the fabric siding in the subassembly process by measuring and cutting the siding to its exact length in the manual cutting process. When these actions were combined in the proposed system, the capacity of the premium mattress production system is expected to increase to 72,656 premium mattresses per year from the current 44,384 mattresses per year. Thus, the solution fulfills its objective of increasing system capacity to at least 60,228 premium mattresses per year for the solution to remain effective at least until the year 2020, as desired by the Bedding Department. Furthermore, the computed expected effective capacity of 68,716 will be able to accommodate the increasing demand up to 2020, which would have an annual demand of 60,037 premium mattresses, verifying that the proposed premium mattress production system will no longer incur the problem of cancelled production units.