Issues Affecting Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Optimization of machinery so that production setups are not required for small customizations which can be managed manually.

Real-world businesses with customers which require product flexibility, in lower volumes, have the beginnings of a job shop production process (Choudhari, Adil, & Ananthakumar, 2012). Such a beginning is further evidenced when the job force is made up of highly skilled employees that are able to help create a wide array of products (Pederson, Dresdow, & Benson, 2013). The job shop process is also very widely used because of its many advantages, and despite the scheduling challenges which it presents (Meredith & Shafer, 2013). Organizations

As demand for specialized products increases, the MTO strategy becomes more popular among the companies. Nowadays, even for standard products, manufacturers are willing to shift their production from traditional concept to MTO or a hybrid production system to achieve shorter production cycle times (Su et al., 2010).

Manufacturing Options. Research your employer (or a company of your choice) and, using Table 6.1 (p. 187), determine which of the six potential manufacturing options has the greatest impact upon the organization and why. Submit a two to three page, APA style paper explaining your reasoning.

The production-line approach allows companies, such as fast-food restaurants, to use a workstation approach and/or an

manufacturing system, scalability is the capacity for adding or removing resources in a cost-effective manner,in order to adjust the production capacity on system in step or stages. System scalabity is used as design of a system manufacturing system and its machines with adjustable structure that enable system adjustment in response to market demand changes .it is the system characteristic that might provide a significant increase of potentials for resolving number of problem in manufacturing system design.scalability of manufacturing gives optimization of manufacturing system design and operation. it presents a systematic approach for scalability planning-adding/subtracting the exact capacity needed to fulfilll market demand. By this concept

Manufacturing support performance cycles serve as the logistics of production. These functions maintain orderly and economic flow of materials and work-in-process inventory to support production schedules. The goal is to support manufacturing requirements in the most efficient manner. These are internal cycles to the firm, thus they are rarely affected by behavioral uncertainty. Customer accommodation performance cycles are those associated with processing & delivering customer orders. They link customers through timely & economical product availability. Physical distribution integrates marketing and manufacturing efforts. To improve the effectiveness forecast accuracy must improve to reduce uncertainty.

Ford realized that he must change his methods of production in order to decrease the price of his automobiles. His invention of the assembly line actually started before the Model T came out, but Ford did not know it at the time. The Model N was built prior to the Model T. The workers on the Model N automobiles placed the parts in order along the floor while the “under-construction” auto was on skids and moved down the line. The workers placed their respective parts on the machine as it passed by. For the Model T, Ford tried to make his process even better. He broke the assembly process into 84 small steps. On top of this, workers were trained for only one of the 84 steps. By having a machine that could make interchangeable parts faster than any human, the process accelerated quickly and there was no shortage on supplies. With the combination of the new parts machine, line of workers trained per step, and an order of parts, the assembly line was born. Figure 1 below shows the wheels and hubcaps of Model T cars being assembled using the assembly line. The excessive amounts

It remoulds the manufacturing industries with optimized productivity by making a radical departure from traditional mastery of a craft and rationalizing work, skills and routines. It is the most common strategies conducted in nowadays large scale secondary industries as its outputs are easily quantifiable and predictable. Also, other industries are adhered to the principles of assembly line (Whitfield, 2004). McDonald is one of the typical examples that demonstrates the incorporation of it into the service industries. Staff mechanically repeat the same specialized task, frying French fries, making hamburgers, filling cups with soft drinks and etc. Customers also inherently conform to the rationalized business mode of McDonald by filing forward in queues to get the meal as if on a conveyor belt. This illustrates that the influence of the assembly line is wide-ranging, profound and long-lasting.

The above cost system was efficient during the 1980s because it split up overhead over three cost pools, adding an additional pool, which has machine hours as its cost driver. This proved efficient because “[w]ith increased usage of automated machines, direct labor run time no longer reflected the amount of processing being performed on parts, particularly when one operator was responsible for several machines.” Packet, pg. 7.

Being able to increase productivity and revenues has always been the greatest challenge of any manager, and the manager of RL Wolfe, a plastic pipe manufacturer, was not an exception. Because of the low-efficiency percentage RL Wolfe had in comparison to their its competitors, John Amasi, director of Production and Engineering , had no other choice then came up with a new way of improving RL Wolfe production methods.

While mass customization is a viable option in manufacturing with digital factories and employing lean manufacturing designs, service firms have to employ a more productive environment to make mass customization profitable. Mass customization refers to using mass production technologies to quickly and cost-effectively assemble goods that are uniquely designed to fit the demands of individual customers (Daft, 2016, p. 271). The key challenge for service mass customization is to translate information about consumer preferences gained through market research into a format that can be easily used for service modularization decisions and customer-contact personnel training (Haas & Kunz, n.d., p. 603). In the service arena, mass customization becomes an ongoing configuration process with direct involvement of the customer coupled with professional advice by service personnel who understand the configuration rules and know them by heart. A clear understanding of the customer’s needs is required, as well as a requirement by service personnel to provide the customer clear and concise configuration options that strike the perfect balance between flexibility and complexity. Also, a continuous interaction between frontline contact personnel and the customer is a consequence that must be

The purpose of this case is to show how a batch system can be dramatically improved by JIT or Cellular concepts. The case clearly describes the changes that must be made in the production system to achieve the benefits desired. This amounts to a complete change in layout of the production floor and a substantial overhaul of the MRP system. The case nicely ties together some of the

Over the last 25 years, it has become harder to satisfy customer demand from inventory and thus making the cost of keeping inventory more expensive. This becomes a problem as new products cannot be produced until the old products have been sold, usually at huge discounts (Anderson, 2014). Therefore, many companies are forced to customize products, to some degree, for increasingly selective customers or to compete in niche markets (Anderson, 2014). However, introducing these customized products into a mass production manufacturing approach is complex and creates high costs of variety.

Originally, flexibility means the ability to be bent, in a mechanics context. With more attention being paid to system dynamics, flexibility is used to indicate the system’s ability to adapt to different circumstance. Particularly in manufacturing, since two decades ago, flexibility has becomes a key consideration ranging from long term decision making like production system design to short term operation planning.