The food industry has been a part of the service sector in Malaysia. The “otak-otak”
industry typically catagorised as SMEs which having common limitations of
extensively depended on human labour instead of advanced machinery. As the “otak�otak” industries are dealing with a less complicated process, the manual production
method is typically selected. Though the production process is not complicated, human
limitations might cause production performance and product quality degradation.
However, the impact of semi-automation to the production of “otak-otak” remained
unclear, thus require the investigation. Through the use of statistical process control,
the performance of the manual and semi-automated production process was
determined. The integration approached of using ARENA and experimental data was
successfully simulates the real production situation. The impact of the implementation
of the semi-automated production system was determined and found positively
improved the total production performance. This new process has satisfied the
minimum requirement of the recommended process capability ratio. Numbers of
production issues associated with manual production were determined including the
inconsistent utilisation of operator, long value-added time, long product waiting as
well as the quality issue of weight inconsistency. The utilization of the operator
increased between 10.60 percent to 23.65 percent with the use of a semi-automation
system compared to manual operation. The value-added time of semi-automation
operation is also shorter than the value-added time of manual operation with the
smallest difference of 0.88 seconds and the biggest difference of 1.49 seconds besides,
37.25 percent to 75.80 percent improvement for waiting time. For the aspect of
manufactured parts per 1 million, the semi-automated operation has greatly reduced
the percentage of product failure in the production of more than 50%. The weight of
the “otak-otak” also can be maintain within the range of company specification (25±1
grams)
