TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter describes the methods and tools employed in the development of a model manufacturing operation used to answer the following three questions, which were presented in Chapter 1:
What are the effects on operational performance, as determined by standard financial reports, resulting from the implementation of a lean manufacturing program?
How do varying accounting systems differ in their reporting of the identified effects?
What is the trend of operational performance over a 12-month period based on the inventory reduction policy chosen?
The simulated factory models a build-to-stock, repetitive manufacturing environment. ProModel Simulation Software from ProModel Corporation, Orem, UT, was used for the development and operation of the simulation model. Excel spreadsheet software from Microsoft Corporation was used for production planning and financial reporting functions and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) was used to automate the execution process and provide a user interface and prompting during execution.
This section describes the statistical model that uses analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test the hypotheses along with Tukey s all pairwise comparison method to determine which factor levels have the greatest effect on the measurements of interest. A brief overview of the analysis of the data describes the usage of the proposed model.
The experimental design, used to address the proposed questions, includes three experimental factors. They are three levels of inventory policy, five levels of management accounting system, and...
