Mejoramiento del proceso de producción de quesos en la empresa Lácteos La Esencia mediante herramientas de manufactura esbelta

Abstract

SUMMARY The present research project shows a proposal for the improvement of the productive process belonging to the fresh cheese line in the company "La Esencia", through the use of lean manufacturing tools that adapt to the problem allowing the reduction of the waste found through an efficient use of the resources available in the production plant. Three stages have been considered for the analysis of lean manufacturing: the first one, diagnostic, which through VSM allows the analysis and identification of waste, thus achieving the identification of changes in waiting or dead times between batches, unnecessary movements and transport of material. In the second stage, through the method of weighted factors, the selection of tools is made, and later in the third stage, the application of these tools is carried out and the improvements they provide to the process of making fresh cheese are determined. The proposed solution contemplates a line balancing where it is evident that the efficiency of the production process increases from 64,10 to 93,48 percent, in the same way the idle or waiting time is considerably reduced from 143,60 to 17,88 minutes per batch, which causes an increase in its production capacity from 6 to 7 batches per day considering that each batch consists of 140 cheeses. On the other hand the application of 5’S allows to maintain a clean and orderly place mitigating the wastes of unnecessary movements and transports, and the application of the standardized work to the process of salting and packing the same one that offers a procedure of support to the workers and avoids this way the generation of wastes, finally by means of Flexsim the proposal is checked.