A study of assembly line balancing problem in clothing manufacturing by simulation

In response to consumer demand, textile producers have had to renovate their production development and marketing efforts. Apart from marketing strategies, textile companies should develop production strategies. Since in the set of whole price of a garment, labour costs are more flexible; labour costs must be lowered for being profitable in clothing manufacturing. In this study to analyze labour-intensive production strategies, a T-shirt production line has been considered for simulation model to test investment strategies of a specific company. Firstly, the statistical tests of the real data taken from job floor by time studies are performed: Independence tests, distribution fit and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for goodness of fit. Then the real data is entered to simulation model for testing the validity of model. Secondly, bottlenecks in the production line are determined. Finally, to eliminate them, possible scenarios are tried by various what-if analyses for suggest investment strategies to company administrator. To set up model, ENTERPRISE DYNAMICS simulation program is used.