ANALYSIS OF FUNCTIONAL BUILD (FB) IN ALUMINIUM EXTRUSION PROCESS INNOVATION BY USING ARENA SOFTWARE

Product innovation plays important role in ensuring the continuity and growth of a
business. Shorter production time and less defect quantity will be the main subject in
order to increase profit. Thus, development of innovation model is a need to make sure
that the business is successful from time to time. Innovation model that will be
discussed in this paper is related to Functional Build (FB) in aluminium extrusion
process. FB is a concept that allows a certain extent of variation to process
specifications whilst maintaining the overall output specification which the customer
would see. A new model of innovation process was developed based on numerous
literatures with the focus of improving the production ramp-up stage of the process. This
paper introduced the idea of permitting the extruded sections which associated with
minor surface imperfections to progress to the next operations since they were proven to
be removed during the anodising operation. Both the previous and new aluminium
extrusion processes were simulated by using Arena simulation software version 5.0 to
analyse the expected improvement of rejection level and production time. Simulation
results showed that the rejected level of extruded sections was reduced by 57.14% and
total processing time was reduced by 8.04%. Hence, it is proven that the application of
FB approach in innovation process of aluminium extrusion products development can
help businesses to reduce the product development lead time and facilitate them to
become more innovative