A system model to improve the productivity of a south African steel industry

South African steel manufacturers are now under pressure to stay functional within the competitive business environment, since the productivity in this industry over the past couple of years has been dwindling. However, productivity measurement and monitoring, which plays an important role in driving steel productivity improvement has not been explored. The present research work therefore developed a system model capable of measuring and monitoring the productivity of these industries. This was achieved by modelling and simulating the South African Steel Industry using the real life manufacturing operating conditions of this industry. Simulation results of the virtual South African Steel Industry showed that the saw master and milling machines, with a total number of 241 and 304 unprocessed workpiece at their respective stations are the bottlenecked machines. Hand sawing machine and relatively cheap milling machine were recommended to support the existing steel production process in order to alleviate the bottlenecks.