Otimização de um processo de produção de linguiças frescais utilizando o software ARENA®

Abstract

The consumption of pork in Brazil has increased considerably over the past years. In 2017, there was pig slaughter record. The exportation also has increased and contributed to the Brazilian economic development. However, most of the pork production is processed. The main product is sausage. Nevertheless, the production process still archaic, even in big industries. Thus, manufacturing process improvement became a complicated issue by the fact that there are no automated steps. In this regard, the modeling and simulation process has been widely used for industrial process optimization. The simulation process has a fundamental role for analysis and understanding of complex systems. Because it is possible to recreate the real system in a controllable environment, thereby, to understand, manipulate and test its behavior in a safe way with costs inferior to those that would be necessary for reproduction of the real system. There are several software options for process simulation. Arena® is a process simulation software integrated into a graphical environment. It has resources for modeling, drawing, animation, statistical analysis, and general process analysis results. Therefore, the goal of this study was to optimize a sausage type frescal line of a food industry using Arena® software. Firstly, the process was observed to identify bottlenecks and study points. It was collected the inlay, weighing and sealing time, because they were the points that spent most of the time in the process. Finally, it was determined the sealing was the production bottleneck because it was only one equipment and one collaborator to seal all the packages. Therefore, it was simulated a scenario where there was one less worker in weighing process and compared it to the current scenario. The simulation result showed that decreasing a person in the scale increased the process time of the product, however, it did not interfere in productivity since the capacity of the inlay is limited to 24 tons. Therefore, it was confirmed the importance of using simulation for decision-making in process optimization, since re-adjustment of the number of employees of the line reduces the costs of the company.