AUTOCOM and technical improvement activities
To improve product quality and efficiency, and to provide a convenient and safe working environment for staff, Seats and Auto Component Plant (AUTOCOM) has been developing their own technical improvement projects. From the beginning of the year, 38 improvements have been applied at the factory, namely Installing shelves for material rolls, conveyor belt for storing and transporting finished seats, seat noise inspection system, dryer to stretch the seat surface, seat frame adjust equipment, design and manufacturing the tester for USB function on chairs, finished seat mattress conveyor belt and more.
In the material storage area, an A-shaped shelf can only store up to 6 rolls on 3 tiers, while there are 1,700 rolls and it takes 920 square meters to store them all. And the searching and receiving supplies still takes manual work, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To fix this, Mr. Tran Minh Thang, a Technical team lead from the plant's Technical Department worked with his team to design and install a 9-row shelf, each row has 17 pillars. Each pillar can store 14 rolls. Accordingly, an entire shelf can accommodate up to 2,240 rolls, reducing the storage area to 780 square meters. The project helped to reduce labor for workers, saving more than VND500 million in the 2023 production costs.
Mr. Tran Minh Thang - Head of Engineering and Technology Team (Technical Department) |
Regarding the seat noise inspection system project, the noise test was performed manually previously, resulting in inaccurate data and inability to retrieve data when needed. Once again, Thang has studied to build a seat noise testing system, which helps control the quality of finished seats, improve productivity and automation in production, and cut down production time and costs.
In another project, to cut down the distance between the finished product shelves to the vehicles which takes time and more manual work, Mr. Nguyen Cong Le, a technical team lead and his team came up with an automated 2-tier conveyor belt for finished products. The system includes 2 conveyor belts, each of which has two 18-meter-long tiers, storing 80 passenger car seats; 2 lifters to move the seats onto the conveyor belt and then to the delivery truck or the way around. The system is under automatic control, making it more convenient to move finished products to delivery trucks, reducing labor, saving storage space and VND90 million in 2023.
In the near future, the team will continue to apply more projects into production, e.g. installing a system of 14 finished pallet conveyors, the anti-adhesive spray control system for the foam injection molding line, and a monitoring and data collection system for the assembly line.