Investigation and optimisation of an intelligent pre-paid water meter assembly

Abstract

The stakeholders and the background of the applicable companies related to the project will be touched on foremost and followed by the aim of the project as well as why the stakeholders were interested in bringing the project into existence. Included in the report is a full literature review on industrial engineering techniques and methods that could benefit the system after design and implementation. The procedures that were identified correspond to various portions of the organisation therefore the system will be broken down into these individual facets and a concept of how to streamline each process will be formulated. The succeeding step will be to combine these concepts to form a more efficient system. The second phase of the project will attend to the actual design of the concepts created in the first phase and form them into working ideas ready for the implementation stage. The method that was the centre of the project that some of the other techniques (lean manufacturing, workforce multi-skilling and assembly line balancing) used indirectly was simulation modelling as it is a very flexible industrial engineering tool with many applications. The other techniques included workplace management, lean manufacturing with specific reference to constraints management and inventory management. As with any project there are issues that restrict the possibilities and enforce certain boundaries concerning what the project will entail. These constraints, along with the resources available, ultimately sculpt the project into how it will address the problem. The concepts that were designed will need to be altered in order for them to fit into the system and for the concepts to collaborate towards an improved system.