Mat Saman

Lean manufacturing concept : the main factor in improving manufacturing performance -a case study

In this ever-competitive business environment, the company that can deliver a product that can thoroughly satisfy the manufacturing outputs will attain the most market share. Besides that, cost cutting is key in competing with lower labour cost region in the world. Inability to execute cost reduction programme effectively will result in loss of contract to competitors. In relation to that, lean manufacturing approach offers tools to pursue reduce operational cost through reduction of waste of resource in the manufacturing industry. This paper has attempted to analyse the current production system of the company. The results show that, the company have to redesign the production system in order to satisfy the current needs. They have to setup a new strategy in order to achieve these needs. Based on that, lean manufacturing concept was suggested to the company and several analyses have been done in order to improve the current performance.

Reverse Supply Chain Framework Proposal for Malaysian Automotive Industry

Automotive product recovery is a process in which End of Life Vehicles (ELV) are recovered from the end user to allow reuse, remanufacture or recycling. The goal is to reduce dependency on virgin materials whilst reducing disposal of automotive waste. While being actively implemented in automotive manufacturing countries such as United States, Germany, Japan, Korea and China, Malaysia has yet to develop its recovery framework. This paper reviews the existing automotive industry framework and a reverse supply chain framework for use in Malaysia were then proposed to further facilitate automotive product recovery in Malaysia.

Fuzzy Application in Sustainability Assessment: A Case Study of Automotive Headlamp

Aspects of environment, economic and social are the three principal elements of sustainability. Within these elements, there are many sub-sustainability parameters need to be considered when sustainability evaluation is carried out which include pollution, cost, energy, health, acidification and others. The inclusion of these parameters and the uncertainty data increases the complexity in decision making process with respect to sustainable development as it not only evaluates the current situation but also the prediction and strategic decision for the future. Consequently, a simplified methods and tools are required in guiding the designers and decision makers to develop sustainable product. Hence, this paper present a fuzzy approach in evaluation of product’s sustainability. The fuzzy logic approach is integrated into the evaluation process as it has a capability to handle severe uncertainty and ability to evaluate qualitative and quantitative data simultaneously. A case study of automotive headlamp is presented to demonstrate the capability of fuzzy technique in sustainability evaluation.