Efficient Utilization of Employees in the Garment Industry using Operations Research.

TOPIC - Efficient Utilization of Employees in the Garment Industry using Operations Research.

INTRODUCTION

Proper utilization of manpower determines the efficiency of a system. The aim is to determine a mechanism for the garment industry to utilize the manpower with highest efficiency. In a garment industry, the study was done to determine the proper mechanism for assigning employees different operations in the sewing section.

The scope is restricted to sewing section due to following considerations-:

(A)          Complex combinations of operation are done by large number of workers.

(B)          Cost of production mainly depend on this section.

SITUATION ANALYSIS

(A)          Current efficiency of employees is 50% and there is a large scope in improvement.

(B)          Selling price of the product is beyond the control of the company due to competition in garment industry.

(C)          There are 450 employees in sewing section which are grouped into 18 teams having approx. 25 employees.

(D)          Teams have number of employees according to the complexity of work.

(E)          Each employee work for 10.5 hours a day and there is 5% absenteeism on an average.

(F)          After getting the cut pieces each employee is given proper instructions and the required tools.

(G)         Time is analyzed by considering sewing time, time for handling tools, arranging and idle time which occur due to delay by previous employee.

(H)         Company currently uses GSD for average time allocation for each operation.

(I)              The experienced staffs assign operations to the employees which is a problem in reaching high efficiency.

CONSTRUCTION OF MODEL

    The decision variables used in the mathematical model of

assignment, are defined as follows:

Xij = 1                 if employee i performs task j                                   2

         0                 otherwise

tij is the time taken by the ith employee to perform the jth

task.

Then the objective function ΣΣt ijxij denotes the total

time required to produce a single product from the style.

Σxij =1 for all j = 1,2,…n                                      3      

Σ xij =1 for all i = 1,2,…m                                    4

Equation (3) states that each task to be performed by exactly

one employee and (4) states each employee is to perform

exactly one task

To minimize this two modifications are done.

(a) the concepts of integer programming have been integrated with the model in order to choose between the best set of employees

Σxij =1 for all j = 1,2,…n

Σ xij =1 for all i = 1,2,…m

Σ Xij = n

(b) It is assumed that more than one employee can be assigned to a single task. Let αj be the number of employees assigned to task j.

Accordingly the final version of the model would read as

Follows

Minimize    ΣΣt ijxij      

subject to   Σ Xij = α

SOLVING THE MODEL USING MICROSOFT EXCEL

The wok book has been designed with a capacity to include 50 employees and 33 tasks generating 1650(=50x33) variables. The high capacity requirement of the model generated can’t be solved by using the inbuilt Excel Solver. Due to this reason an Excel add-in is used to replace the Excel Solver. the generated Excel workbook requires no technical work to be done by the user. It is recommended to keep a separate workbook for each team. However the maximum number of employees that can be entered into the workbook is 50, which is around twice the number of employees that is usually allocated into a team. This has enabled the company to keep additional records of important employees. These additional records can be used to evaluate the team with different combinations of employees which can be used for efficient employee transitions between teams. The first sheet of the workbook is named “Timing”. This includes previous timing records of each and every employee in respect of styles. These timing records are obtained by calculating the time taken by a particular employee to perform a particular operation per unit of SMV In the next worksheet the final model is presented in the form of two matrices. The first matrix provides the time taken by each and every employee to complete each task defined. The second matrix contains binary values which indicate whether a given employee is assigned for a given task or not.

Whenever the user enters the details of the style to the workbook, the default values of the two matrices are automatically calculated

RESULTS

The efficiency of the company is calculated by the formula

E =( (n × TSMV ) / 60  )/PH                                                                  (13)

Where E: Efficiency

           n: Number of units produced within the day

    TSMV: Total SMV of the style

          PH: Production hours of the day.

The efficiency has increased dramatically due to application of the model developed by this study and reached to 80%. This improvement was mainly achieved by minimizing the bottlenecks by the optimal allocation of the employees.

CONCLUSION

This improvement was mainly achieved by minimizing the bottlenecks by the optimal allocation of the employees. The goal was successfully achieved by using the linear programming algorithm.