Scientific Experiences in Applied Technology

The manual dough-forming process remains a productivity constraint in small-scale milk pie production due to repetitive pressing activities and high dependence on operator performance. This work aimed to design, develop, and evaluate a semi-automatic milk pie dough-forming machine to improve production capacity and labor productivity in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The machine development involved user-need identification, design specification, conceptual and detailed design, material and component selection, manufacturing, assembly, and performance testing. The developed machine had overall dimensions of 550 × 500 × 850 mm and was powered by a 0.5 HP electric motor. A single forming station with a mold diameter of 70 mm and a depth of 20 mm was employed. Machine performance was evaluated by comparing the production capacity and labor productivity of manual and semi-automatic forming processes. The results showed that the machine increased the forming capacity from 200 to 650 pies/h, corresponding to a 225% improvement or 3.25 times the manual process capacity. The number of workers required for the forming process decreased from three to one, increasing labor productivity from 66.67 to 650 pies/person/h, equivalent to an 875% improvement. The substantial increase in throughput was primarily attributed to the transfer of repetitive pressing activities from human operators to the motor-driven forming mechanism. These results demonstrate that targeted mechanization of the dough-forming stage can significantly improve production capacity and labor utilization in small-scale milk pie production. Further evaluation of product dimensional uniformity, energy consumption, hygienic design, and long-term operational reliability is required to provide a more comprehensive assessment of machine performance.