RESOURCE OPTIMISATION THROUGH CONSTRAINT MANAGEMENT AT MALAS DRIVESTYLE CENTRE

Abstract

Malas (Pty) Ltd, a retail and distribution company, has been engaged in the tyre industry for over three decades specializing in the supply of wheels and tyre products together with related services to the South African market. Due to the increase in export and domestic sales of automobiles, the South African tyre market is expected to witness phenomenal growth over the next couple of years. The service centre, the Malas Drivestyle Centre houses a large and sophisticated workshop where its services are rendered. Currently it seems as if it is operating at full capacity, however, there is a great concern regarding the number of vehicles serviced per day. Management is of the opinion that maintaining current methods is hindering the company's ability to be able to satisfy the additional demand in order to remain competitive within the industry. The entire service system is constrained by the activities of the Workshop thus, this project focuses on a capacity analysis of the Workshop. The analysis will identify and aim to remove bottlenecks present in the system as well as provide an efficient manner of re-allocating resources to ensure system performance and the throughput rate is improved. After an investigation of Industrial Engineering tools, techniques and skills to solve capacity constrained systems was conducted, Simulation Modelling was selected as it is the best tool to accurately represent a real life complex system. The current As-Is model was modelled by the simulation, thus activities and resources were required to be analyzed in detail to construct the model as well as data analysis of real system data from the companies WMS system. Scenarios were generated using OptQuest with the primary objective to maximize profit. Profit is a surrogate measure for the throughput rate. OptQuest automatically generates optimal scenarios with alternative resource configurations. Using the SMORE plots in Simio, the best performing alternatives which are statistically significantly similar to each other were identified. These alternatives were recommended to Malas as a manner of planning and re-allocating their resources. By implementing this, not only is profits maximized but utilization of resources is inherently improved by the model. As a result the inefficiencies such as long queues and delays will be improved which results in increased customer satisfaction. The project aims to deliver a model to the firm to act as a decision support system to aid in strategic future plans. Thus it is highly recommended to implement this solution to ensure the long term objectives of Malas are achieved.