Streamlining Kyaro's Wheelchair Manufacturing Process

Kyaro Assistive Tech aims to provide affordable, appealing, and appropriate assistive devices to the millions in East Africa without access. Our project aims to enhance the affordability tenet of Kyaro’s work through improving their wheelchair manufacturing process. With the current wheelchair taking 17 hours per unit to produce, our project objective is to reduce this by two hours. This time savings will reduce cost for Kyaro, allowing them to scale and/or reduce cost for consumers. In evaluation of Kyaro’s wheelchair manufacturing process, we identified five major projects to achieve this goal. These projects were identified due to glaring inefficiencies in current designs and processes. Each project was supported with a set of engineering requirements that were validated through testing before implementation into the manufacturing line. Our first quarter’s work focused on creating jigs and fixtures for three processes: drilling of the hole plate, welding of the footrest, and tube bending for the push rim. We successfully designed, fabricated, and validated two finished products. The hole plate drilling fixture saved a total 17 minutes and the footrest welding fixture saved 8 minutes. During our visit to the manufacturing workshop in Arusha, Tanzania where we tested prototypes for our first three projects at the halfway point of our timeline, we identified two high impact projects to take on for the next quarter after discussion with Kyaro technicians and leadership. This was a redesign of the wheelchair frame to reduce joint complexity and a novel fixture to support the welding of this redesign. With these two projects allowing for the implementation of new processes being introduced at Kyaro, their total time savings amounted to 3 hours and 15 minutes. Overall, we were able to save a total of 3 hours and 40 minutes through our work, exceeding our initial goal of two hours. While our first quarter’s work is fully implemented, there is still work to be done on implementing our validated frame redesign and improving the frame welding fixture. Additionally, with new processes being introduced to the line, it is important to conduct a thorough time study to reorganize the workflow, material handling, and quality control of the whole manufacturing process to further reduce inefficiency.