Continuous Quality Improvement Studies in a Gypsum Board Manufacturing Unit-A Case Analysis

This work is based on an actual case of an organization carried out in their manufacturing unit, producing gypsum plaster boards of different varieties, which also includes a regular board. Initial study revealed that the plant has a capacity to produce approximately 18, 00,000 units of regular boards per month. The raw material required for each board is about 2.026 square meters. During the study it was identified that the rejection rate was around 4% on an average, which led to raw material wastage estimated to the tune of 8820 square meters of paper. The aim of the project was to reduce the percentage of rejections and wastage of paper. After detailed analysis of the existing process it was found that, the paper preparation and splicing operation were the critical stages. A comprehensive list of possible causes for the wastages and defects during production in the two critical stages was documented. It was recognized that the knife used by the operators for removal of damaged paper layers was the critical reason causing wastages in the line. Therefore an improvised knife design was proposed that was capable of significantly reducing the paper wastage to the tune of 50% per reel. Further, the problems in splicing stage were analyzed and fool proof designs were proposed. In order to institute the improvements, the revised standard operating procedures were recommended. Also a new standard plan was proposed for effective collection of data pertaining to number of boards per stack using sensors.