An Empirical Investigation of the Relationship between Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) and Manufacturing Sustainability in Industry 4.0 with Time Study Approach

Poorya Ghafoorpoor Yazdi, Aydin Azizi and Majid Hashemipour
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Poorya Ghafoorpoor Yazdi: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta 99628, Northern Cyprus
Aydin Azizi: Engineering Department, German University of Technology, Muscat 130, Oman
Majid Hashemipour: Faculty of Engineering, Cyprus International University, Nicosia 99258, Northern Cyprus

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 9, 1-28

Abstract: Nowadays, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are becoming increasingly competitive. In order to fulfill the rapidly changing market and diversified demands of customers, the SMEs need to achieve and maintain high productivity and quality, with fast response, sufficient flexibility, and short lead times. Therefore, Industry 4.0 offers various manufacturing paradigms that might be a solution in order to increase the productivity of SMEs such as intelligent and flexible manufacturing. Furthermore, in the last decade, the emphasis on adopting eco-friendly practices, implementing sustainability measures, and protecting the environment has continued to grow, to gain traction across SMEs. In fact, because of this need, many SMEs are now adopting sustainable manufacturing practices in response to this increased focus on sustainability and environmental stewardship. The main purpose of this paper is to design and study the implementation of a sustainable, intelligent material handling system for material distribution with utilizing an agent-based algorithm as control architecture. A time study-based methodology has been implemented to evaluate the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) to identify the matters that need to be resolved and optimized to increase the OEE percentage with consideration of the sustainability of the system. An exhaustive analytical trend applied to the generated time study data. Accordingly, further hardware, software, and layout design limitation and problems detected, and the proper solutions were anticipated. The observed time study results were presented, a fundamental set of analytical observation and information with associated histograms was reviewed. In addition, the study aims to recognize and analyze effective factors on the sustainability of improved processes, using a simple model. To do this, using experts’ viewpoints, affective factors on the sustainability of process improvement activities are determined.

Keywords: small and medium enterprises; OEE; OECD; manufacturing sustainability; time study; Industry 4.0; material handling systems; agent-based control architecture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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