Organising the internal transport to increase lift trucks utilisation : A case study at a large manufacturing company

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the internal transport of a case company and develop a new approach to increase the utilisation rate of their lift trucks. The case study was conducted at a large manufacturing company in southern Sweden and limited to two of their production facilities, denoted PVT and Tage, with a total of 27 lift trucks. The current data provided by the case company imposed limitations on decision-making since it only specified the total number of hours each truck was used in a year. By mapping out the current material handling processes at both facilities, opportunities were identified on how the internal transport can be organised in an economically justifiable way. The empirical data was collected through observations, time studies and interviews. The data was analysed based on the total truck cycle time, idle time and waiting time. The findings highlighted that the lift trucks had low utilisation rate and that there was room for improvements. Through a sensitivity analysis, it was concluded that two trucks from PVT and one truck from Tage could be removed. Additionally, the utilisation rate of the remaining trucks can be increased by letting several production lines share the same truck. For the new suggested internal transport to function properly, the first recommendation is to ensure that the trucks have enough battery capacity, otherwise, truck availability will decrease, making the overall production inefficient. The second recommendation is to eliminate non-value-adding transport activities performed by the machine operators. This can be done by delegating such transport activities to other employees, such as truck drivers and coordinators. These recommendations help the case company to improve efficiencies in their internal transport. Furthermore, the findings highlight the need and possibility for transport efficiency improvements overall and how it can be approached.