25-01-2013, 03:30 PM
Application of Simulation for the Improvement of Four Wheeler Service Sector
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Abstract :
The contribution of the service sector to
the economy of the developed and developing
countries are significant. For instance, in India, the
service sector contributing nearly more than 5
percentage of GDP. To retain its role for contributing
much for the economy and to enhance customer
satisfaction, there is a need to study the underlying
factors in the service sector. In this paper automobile
four-wheeler service sector in India has been
presented. A discrete event simulation has been used
to highlight the difficulties involved in a typical fourwheeler
service centre.
Introduction
The contribution of the service sector plays a
significant role in employment generation and
growth of economy as well in developed countries
like India. Hence, many of the researchers are
focusing to study the issues involved in and
developing this sector. Studies reveals
improvement of technology and implementation of
scientific approaches etc. are the important issues
needs to be exploited for improving the service
rates of the centers to retain its role for contributing
much for the economy and the customer
satisfaction as well.
With advent of liberalization and globalization,
automobile Industry sector in India has shown a
significant growth over the past two decades. India
has become the second largest producer of four
wheeler vehicles after China. Literature shows
when compared to the growth rates of four
wheelers, there is no proportionate growth in the
service centers, as a result, servicing rates are
decreasing and average delay is increasing which
causing the customer dissatisfaction.
Discrete Event Simulation
Simulation has become important and its use is
widespread, in manufacturing and service
industries as well (Herbst et al., 1997). Simulation
is the imitation of the operation of a real-world
process or system over time. It involves
Generation of an artificial history of the
system
Observation of the artificial history
Drawing inferences concerning the
operating characteristics of the real system
It is an analysis tool for predicting the effect of
changes to existing systems and also predicts the
performance of new systems under varying sets of
circumstances.
Questionnaire Survey and Data Collection
A structured questionnaire has been developed
(Best and Kahn,1986) to obtain the data from the
service centers. It contains two sections. Section
one seek the respondents profile and the other
section seeks information related to service
activities and its duration. In this paper, for
simulation four-wheeler passenger car vehicles
service centers data has been taken and especially
Maruti Suzuki Dealer workshops and authorized
service stations because Maruthi Suzuki brand
occupied 60% of the passenger car in the market.
To assess centre validity a dry run was made and
few questionnaires were administered with two
leading practitioners, one professional and two
academicians.
Simulation Model Development and Its
Analysis
Based on the above flow chart, the simulation
model (Figure 4) was developed using a well
known and versatile simulation software package
tool Arena-10. In this model, routinely used
standard area modules such as create (customers
vehicles enter the system), dispose (customer’s
vehicles leave the system), process or operation
(vehicles undergo evaluation, repair, or inspection)
and decide (free or paid service and minor or major
operations) operations are used. The model was
simulated using the collected data and analyzed the
results.
Basically the rate of new arrival vehicles is
increasing day by day. Similarly the paid vehicles
number also increases. It shows that as the number
of paid service vehicles increases, the
corresponding delivery rates are decreasing and
observed that operations carried out in the second
stage are bottleneck to the delivery.
Conclusions
In this paper, servicing activities carried out in a 4-
wheeler service centers have been studied through a
questionnaire survey. To understand the bottleneck
operations and to improve the service rate, a discrete
event simulation model has been developed. The
conclusions drawn from the results are
1) In service centers as and when the sales
increase, the number of vehicles arriving for
the service generally increases. As this
number increases the rate of delivery of
vehicles are decreasing. Hence the capacity
of the vehicle to be delivered is shown in a
declining trend.
2) The results depicts that operation 2 is the
bottleneck for the delivery of the vehicle.
Most of the vehicles are getting delayed at
operations 2.
3) In the group of operations 2 five activities
are being carried out and hence, further
study of these activities and related issues
needs to be studied.