Haftu Hailu1, Hideki Tabuchi*, Hiroshi Ezawa and Kassu Jilcha
At the present time most of Ethiopian leather manufacturing industries are facing tough competition globally due to deteri-orated quality of leather. Clearly known that poor quality results in increasing manufacturing cost. Lastly, the industry becomes unprofitable. In addition, the industries are forced to lose their customers. Sheba leather Industry PLC is one of Ethiopian leather manufacturing industry facing this problem. So, the purpose of the project is to decrease extreme trimmed and rejected leather, to introduce a system that is capable of solving the problem, to expand findings to other sections of the industry. There was a problem of trimmed and rejected skin leather at re-tanning and crust preparation section. 14,879.92 kg of trimmed skin leather and 8,164 pieces of rejected leather. The problem solving methodology approach was used during the project work to reduce both trimmed and rejected leather. Quality control 7 tools were also applied as per the nature of the steps of problem solving. The findings after completion of the implementation period the excessive trimmed leather is reduced to 8,524 kg by 42.71% improvement. The rejected leather of minimized to 5,241 pieces of leather by 35.80% improvement. In addition, systems like standard operation procedure, standardization of four basic autonomous maintenance activities, quality control process chart and operator skill analysis are introduced on potential areas. Besides, the area of the finished leather also improves by 2.2% relative to the input size of the leather. Finally, the department managers took responsibility to sustain the substantial improvements and expand these systems to hide production section of the company.
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