A systems study on the Operations Department of Eastern International Plastic Packaging Corporation

• Main Authors: Hangod, Angelica Claire S., Siat, Joyce Anne M., Sison, Rochelle C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2014
• Subjects: Industrial engineering; Eastern International Plastic Packaging Corporation
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/7467
• Institution: De La Salle University

The Operations Department of Eastern International Plastic Packaging Corporation (EIPPC) focuses on the continuous production of quality plastic bottles. However, problems were raised in quality assurance concerning the high rejection rate on quarantine area inspection rejects (QAIR). It was found out that QAIR reaches up to78.9% rejection rate from December 2012 to November 2013, amounting to an approximate Php72.9 million additional cost yearly. The study focused on reducing QAIR rejects on the company's top producing product line Green Cross 250mL alcohol bottles upon management request. The main QAIR issues found on the said product line are underweight, under volume and uneven thickness uniformity of bottles. Based on literature study, interview and validation on the system, there are two main causes of the problem namely: delay in resin refilling and wrong temperature setting. Due to time and accessibility constraints, sampling is performed. Results therefore are not based on the actual data. It was found that resin level in the machine funnel reaches less than the required quantity of machine. This causes thinning of the resin mixture flow in the machine parison, as well as misalignment of the die head, resulting to underweight, under volume and uneven thickness uniformity bottles. In addition, it was also found that the current temperature tolerance settings being adopted in machine initialization, ranging from 160 to 190°C, is too high such that it enables the production of underweight and under volume bottles. With the aim to reduce the number of rejects concerning the main issues the available resources of the system, a scheduling program was designed to address the delay in resin refilling, and re-establishing of temperature tolerance limits was made to address the wrong temperature setting. The Excel Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) was used to create a scheduling program which computes the refilling intervals for the whole machine production run of the system. On the other hand, a regression analysis was used to determine the best temperature settings for machine used in producing Green Cross 250 mL alcohol bottles, it is however found that there is no best setting that would completely eliminate the production of rejects the range of temperature values computed on regression analysis shows that the best temperature setting to create conforming bottles in terms of volume would be producing overweight bottles and vice versa. As such, a t-test prediction interval analysis was used to determine the best trade-off to reduce production of bottle non-conformance for both volume and weight. As a conclusion, the bets temperature setting is found to range only from 157 to 60°C. Using the proposed solution, it was found that Green Cross alcohol bottle rejection occurrences on volume, weight and uneven thickness uniformity was reduced to 9.7%, amounting to a net present value of Php15,502,398.82. to further reduce the overall rejects subjected to QAIR, it is recommended to integrate the same method of study to other product lines.