Determination the percent of bottleneck in stations of Rio vehicle mechanical assembly line in SAIPA automotive corporation

Systems of the automobile manufacturing process in order to develop an effective and efficient process to ensure the system throughput. Implementing changes can be a difficult task for any automobile manufacturing process. For this purpose modeling of complex systems such as manufacturing systems is an arduous task. Simulation allows designers to imagine new systems and enabling them to both quantify and observe behavior. In some automobile manufacturing systems, bottleneck station in assembly lines is variable and related to some stations in each cycle, not only one station. In other words, in each of production cycles, every station may be system bottleneck. In such a case, the system bottleneck varies from one production cycle to next production cycle. Mechanical assembly line of Rio vehicle in SAIPA automotive corporation has different bottleneck in each cycle and bottleneck varies from one cycle to next cycle in this assembly line. In this regard, the aim of this paper is determination the percent of bottleneck in stations of mechanical assembly line of Rio vehicle in SAIPA automotive corporation. The best solution for achieving this goal is use of simulation technique. In this regard, we used an effective simulation methodology which is designed by, Michigan University simulation user group, technical committee on simulation methodology in Michigan University. Based on mentioned methodology as 12 steps, we modeled mechanical assembly line of Rio vehicle in SAIPA automotive corporation. We utilized Showflow software as one of the best software in automobile systems simulation for modeling and simulation of mentioned system. Obtained results showed the variability of bottleneck in mechanical assembly line of Rio vehicle in each cycle. Based on mentioned results, in 14% of cases, station 22 (assembly of fuel tank and accessories), in 30% of cases, station 23 (connection of rear axle to body), in 26% of cases, station 24 (connection of engine to body) and in 30% of cases, station 26 (assembly of tires) are bottlenecks of the mechanical assembly line of Rio vehicle and station 25 (connection of exhaust to body) is never a bottleneck for system.