Process Evaluation & Improvement

Abstract:  This thesis was conducted to analyze and investigate improvement methods for the testing process of steam sterilizers at Getinge AB.Getinge is a leading MedTech multinational company based in Sweden. Steam sterilizer is one of their prominent products. A series of testing must be done before handing over the product to the customer, which mainly requires water and steam as consumable resources. The intention of this project is to find improvement methods or optimization techniques for the testing process and reduce the consumption of resources which would significantly impact the production lead time and cost. Upon the careful examination of the testing process it has been noticed that a significant amount of pure water with heat content has been wasted during the testing process, which could be recirculated/ reused, and the heat could be regenerated for useful purposes. The proposed optimization suggestions through this project are a thermally stratified tank which could handle cold and hot water as the testing process needs the supply of both. Majority of the faults during testing are identified in software implementation and a few in mechanical. A dummy testing is recommended to identify the faults in the implementation of the software without the need of consumable resources. A few methods to tackle mechanical faults are discussed further in this report. When implementing these optimization suggestions, it would drastically improve the testing process by reducing the consumption of resources like water, steam, natural gas, time, and labor.