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The furniture and metal work industry typically involves a number of stages, including
receiving raw materials, cutting, sanding, laminating, shaping, drilling, brushing,
assembly and finishing. The long process cycle time, the frequent of machine downtime
and the poor layout of the factory have added to the complexity and challenges of
furniture manufacturing micro industry. Producing goods blindly may result in
material wastage, high lead time, more work in process time and also can cause machine
failure. To minimize such kind of problem, the university education should link with
micro-enterprise industry to improve their manufacturing system. Among the
problems that micro-enterprises face are work process flow and facility layout of
their machinery. In today’s competitive market, the survival of any industry greatly
depends on response time, production costs and flexibility in manufacturing (Chase
et al., 2006). For almost all manufacturing industries, an increased productivity and
better overall efficiency of the production line are the most important goals. In
order to overcome the lower productivity problem, a thorough understanding and
research of the process in the existing company are necessary so that an efficient
improvement can be generated to increase the productivity in the researched company.
In fact, there is a good number of management techniques such as Zero Inventory
(ZI), Just-In-Time (JIT), Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS), Optimized
Production Technology (OPT) and Total Quality Management (TQM) that support
the implementation of productivity improvement plans. However, the most favored
among these methods is the productivity improvement via facility layout optimization
and simulation method that improves the work flow speed and decreases work in
process time.
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