Total Operations Solutions
A holistic approach to Operations Management, this book focuses on value chain management, addresses new and current issues, and covers an implementation program to demonstrate how to put the methodology into practice.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Total Operations Solutions
How to Improve Flexibility in Manufacturing?
A change to a flexible system will require careful planning, capital investment and a change in attitude by workers. Intensive training of workers will be required. During the change-over productivity is likely to drop. Additionally, flexibility does imply some slack in the system. The first consideration then must be to be certain that there are benefits to be gained from changing from long runs to a flexible system. Additionally, flexibility does suggest the acceptance of some slack in the system. Even if flexibility is achieved without cost, it should not be wasted in areas where it could be avoided.
Aflexibility strategy, if adopted, should be applied at different stages of the business process across all functions. It is not the responsibility of manufacturing alone and should span product design, process design, operations management, human resources, suppliers, systems flexibility and modular design.
Product Design
One important factor affecting the decision to adopt flexibility or not is product design philosophy aimed at reducing complexity. The harmonization of products and materials can reduce the number of SKUs and production change-over times without reducing the variety for customers. For example, it is easy to standardize the shape and size of ice-cream cones and maintain different flavour and packaging so as to split markets.
Process Design
We discussed the rationale of FMS in the previous section. Although advanced flexible plants with programmable controls (e.g. FMS, robotics, CAD/CAM) offer efficient product change-over, the high initial capital cost and inadequate local...
Copyright Ron Basu and J. Nevan Wright 2005 under license agreement with Books24x7
