A simulation analysis of the impact of family configuration on virtual cellular manufacturing

Past research has shown that it is possible to simultaneously achieve the setup efficiencies of traditional cellular manufacturing systems and the routeing flexibility of a job shop by viewing cells not as permanent, physical structures, but as temporary, 'virtual' entities. This research demonstrates that the advantages of virtual manufacturing cells can be obtained over a range of part family configurations. In particular, virtual cellular manufacturing is robust to changes in the number and size of families being processed. Further, the research shows that the benefits can be obtained under setup conditions impartial to a family-oriented part environment.     

Kanban implementation between a heavy manufacturing department and foundry suppliers

Implementation of JIT methods often begins in an assembly department with the introduction of kanban. Only when the implementation program begins in the fabrication areas supplying the assembly department do the most serious problems with JIT arise. The farther back in the supply chain JIT is implemented, the harder problems become, especially in the management of outside suppliers such as foundries where economics still requires the batching of jobs. Faced with supplying a tractor assembly line, department 500, a producer of heavy cast iron transmission cases using transfer lines and MRP, implemented kanban not only to supply the assembly area, but also back to their own supplying foundries. The results were positive and suggest a need for creativity in JIT implementation rather than a strict adherence to a cookbook approach.     

The extended enterprise-a context for manufacturing

Today's manufacturing enterprises face tremendous competitive pressures. Global competition, together with market demands for customized products delivered just in time, place tremendous pressures on manufacturers. The emerging global economy is rapidly replacing local markets. The emergence of open markets, reductions in trade barriers, and improvements in transportation and communications links have led to a situation where local competition and markets operate in the context of global standards. This open infrastructure allows manufacturers to respond to these challenges by working more closely with their suppliers and customers, and by building extended enterprises across the whole value chain. Such extended enterprises present great challenges in terms of redesigning business processes to create a competitive advantage from the linkages they include. This paper describes the manufacturing philosophies currently in vogue. Any manufacturing or related business will need to use them, albeit tailored to its own circumstances, in one form or the other, to ensure its prosperity.     

Selecting IT applications in manufacturing: a KBS approach

The use of the right type of Information Technology (IT) applications or manufacturing systems is expected to usher in a competitive advantage. Selection of the right type of IT application is, however, a challenging task. When a company, with a given dominant process structure, emphasizes two or more competitive priorities, such as quality, product flexibility, etc., an unaided manager faces a complex decision problem in choosing from alternative IT applications available in the areas of product design through distribution. In this paper, we present a Knowledge Based System (KBS) that would assist managers with the identification of IT applications that are consistent with both the competitive priorities and the process structure. Validation of the system illustrates that its performance is consistent with the human experts, and it has the potential to facilitate effective and swift decision-making in the selection of appropriate IT applications that best match an organization's manufacturing strategy.     

Survey of resource allocation methods for distributed manufacturing systems

Distributed manufacturing systems are more flexible in their arrangement and use of their resources. This permits a more dynamic and opportunistic allocation of manufacturing resources to work elements than is possible with today's centralized allocation systems. However, unlike solving the problem from a single solver view, there is no absolute control or tight coordination over how and when to decompose the problem, when to undertake a solution or the procedure for verifying consistency. Such activities will largely be left to the distributed entities to decide either individually or jointly. As a consequence the resulting allocations may suffer and induce myopic behaviour lacking in stability and regularity in the performance of the total system. Thus, the issues connected with solving the problem often move beyond the pure algorithmic focus of computation to include how the problem is decomposed, how or to whom it is assigned, and the organization for solving the subproblems, strategies used for resolving conflicts, the manner in which communication is conducted, etc. These issues, in fact, highlight the holistic nature of the solution and are used here as parameters to compare and contrast the approaches reported in the literature.     

Multi-objective machine-component grouping in cellular manufacturing: A genetic algorithm

The cellular manufacturing system (CMS) is an important group technology (GT) application. The first step of CMS design is cell formation, generally known as machinecell formation (MCF) or machine-component (MCG). A genetic algorithm (GA) is a robust adaptive optimization method based on principles of natural evolution and is appropriate for the MCG problem, which is an NP complete complex problem. In this study, we propose a GA-based procedure to solve the MCG problem. More specifically, this study aims to minimize (1) total cost, which includes intercell and intracell part transportation costs and machines investment cots; (2) intracell machine loading imbalance; and (3) intercell machine loading imbalance under many realistic considerations. An illustrative example and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of this procedure. The proposed procedure is extremely adaptive, flexible, efficient and can be used to solve real MCG problems in factories by providing robust manufacturing cell formation in a short execution time.     

An exploratory study of manufacturing strategy practices of machinery manufacturing companies in India

This paper presents findings of a survey on manufacturing strategy practices adopted by the Indian machinery manufacturing companies (IMMC). Based on the survey, three companies have been selected for detailed case studies. Their experiences in the manufacturing strategy process are analyzed. Although the companies represented diversity in terms of product type, sales volume, and geographic location, they share several commonalties including use of advanced manufacturing technologies and use of several improvement techniques. The process of strategy formulation varied among the companies in terms of participants, complexity and degree of formalization. Competitive priorities, order winners and critical success factors are also identified for these companies. Based on strategic manufacturing issues, manufacturing competence index and business performance index for the companies has been worked out.     

Development and implementation of new technologies in the steel industry

At each successive stage in the R&D cycle leading to the commercialization of a new technology, management in any industry must reevaluate prospects and make decisions accordingly. However, for the steel industry the difficulties of this kind of decision-making throughout the usually lengthy R&D cycle are heightened by the very nature of the industry. For example, the large scale of its processes and the high capital costs for plants for new processes mean that the progressive scale-ups during a given development may themselves cost millions. From Bethlehem Steel's experience the author cites one new product and two major process developments to illustrate technical and economic considerations that enter into decision-making as R&D moves step by step toward the commercialization of new technology.     

An expert system for a semiconductor manufacturing environment

We developed an expert system to analyse and suggest solutions to problems commonly encountered in the production of integrated circuits. We wrote a PC-based program to implement the expert system. Our goal is to enable interested readers to relate some of the accomplishments realized by a high tech manufacturing company to their own production, manufacturing or maintenance environment. We discuss the difficulties encountered when implementing an expert system as well as the great benefits derived from its use.     

Simplest strategies method for manufacturing workcell restoration

We consider the production process of a manufacturing workcell. Production items obtained from an outside supplier are not processed adequately as far as their quality is concerned. Production items meeting the required quality depend on the workcell state, which degrades according to the number of produced items. The workcell is completely restored by some restoring operations leading to its as-new condition. The method of deriving the restoration period, which leads to the maximum probability that produced items meet the required quality, is introduced. It is based on the nontraditional approach, i.e. on the simplest strategies method for the formulation of the problem presented here. The implementation of this optimization approach is illustrated with an example.     

An efficient generalized network-simplex-based algorithm for manufacturing network flows

Fang and Qi (Optim. Methods Softw. 18:143–165, 2003) introduced a new generalized network flow model called manufacturing network flow model for manufacturing process modeling. A key distinguishing feature of such models is the assembling of component raw-materials, in a given proportion, into an end-product. This assembling operation cannot be modeled using usual generalized networks (which allow gains and losses in flows), or using multi-commodity networks (which allow flows of multiple commodity types on a single arc). The authors developed a network-simplex-based algorithm to solve a minimum cost flow problem formulated on such a generalized network and indicated systems of linear equations that need to be solved during the course of the network-simplex-based solution procedure. In this paper, it is first shown how various steps of the network-simplex-based solution procedure can be performed efficiently using appropriate data structures. Further, it is also shown how the resulting system of linear equations can be solved directly on the generalized network.     

Fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making for evaluating manufacturing flexibility

Evaluation of manufacturing flexibility in operations management is important to determine the competitiveness of manufacturing system, and is being increasing discussed in the literature on manufacturing system. The objective of this research is to develop a multi-attribute decision-making model based on fuzzy set theory to improving the manufacturing flexibility evaluation process. Since most information available in this stage is not numerical, fuzzy linguistic assessment is used to represent the performance rating of all flexibility metrics under flexibility dimensions and importance grade of all flexibility dimensions. This paper proposes a modified LOWA operator, which uses the maximum entropy weights, and uses it to direct computation on linguistic terms. The developed model evaluates the degree of manufacturing flexibility that can assist decision-makers, when making capital investment decisions and measuring performance, in finding the need for improving manufacturing flexibility, and in determining the dimensions of flexibility as the best directions to improvement. Examples using a case study of leading Taiwan firm in the bicycle industry are used to illustrate the concept developed. In addition, sensitivity analysis can be performed to examine the solution reasonability.     

Implementation of continuous flow manufacturing (CFM) system

In a world of global competition and demanding customers, putting production requirements ahead of customer's needs inevitably leads to manufacturing inefficiencies, higher inventories, and poor quality goods and services. In continuous flow manufacturing (CFM) system, the manufacturer makes how much and what is needed, and also when it is needed. A leading multinational company in oral care products produces toothbrushes through contract manufacturers (CMs). The contract manufacturer makes different stock-keeping units (SKUs) under two options: (i) the contract manufacturing option, in which CM supplies the finished products; (ii) the labour contract, in which CM is responsible only for conversion. Competitive pressure in the market pressures the company to change the operating system from the push system to CFM for CMs also. Moving from the push system with its high level of inventories to continuous flow manufacturing system enables the achievement of improved customer responsiveness, greater efficiencies, lower inventories and lower operating costs. This paper describes the way in which one such contract manufacturer was moved towards the CFM system and the benefits achieved through it.     

Delayed creative destruction and the coexistence of technologies

Disruptive innovations often engage in a fierce battle with incumbent technologies for hegemony. Past studies on technological innovations are silent about factors that extend the duration of the ‘era of ferment’—that is, the period during which competing technologies fight for dominance. We argue that complexity of the underlying technology, ecological and institutional dynamics may permit coexistence of competing technology regimes. The paper illustrates such coexistence by discussing the persistence of disparate technologies in steel making and kidney disease treatment. We conclude that the process of ‘creative destruction’ can be delayed in certain settings.     

Simulated annealing procedure for scheduling competing tasks in flexible manufacturing

This paper presents a simulated annealing SA procedure heuristic for the problem of scheduling N tasks on a machine equipped with an automatic tool changer to minimize the makespan time. The problem is first formulated as a symmetric travelling salesman problem TSP . A local search heuristic procedure is developed, then embedded into SA algorithm to enhance its performance. The implemented SA heuristic has the following features: an exponential acceptance function with non-monotonic cooling schedule, heuristic pre-processing, and a neighbourhood of changing the sequence of a small number of tasks and named the k-interchange procedure. The algorithm is compared with an exact solution method on a set of practical-sized problems. The proposed algorithm performed very well in terms of solution quality and computation time.     

先进制造技术与企业的现代化

由于世界市场动态多变的需要,先进制造技术应运而生。本文通过对先进制造技术发展的叙述,分析了先进制造技术对企业的影响,并针对我国发展现状提出若干对策。     

A framework for evaluating the benefits of collaborative technologies in engineering innovation networks

In times of rapid economic change, the decrease in knowledge value becomes inversely proportional to its speed of obsolescence, with successful organisations seeking to connect more rapidly and more effectively with others in the creation of new knowledge. The past decade has seen a growing interest in communities of practice as a method for transferring and generating knowledge within product development, rooted as they are in the nature of knowledge creation as a socially embedded process. Given the widespread adoption of collaborative technologies as facilitative platforms for innovation in the interactions of contemporary communities of practice, the objective of this research is to develop an evaluation paradigm and employ it to examine how such interaction is facilitated through the medium of Web 2.0 technologies. The contribution of this research to theory and innovation technology practice will be to further the understanding of collaborative technologies by examining the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on engineering innovation networks. Furthermore, it brings together the three diverse research areas of technology innovation, internet collaborative tools and psychological barriers and enablers.     

Guidelines for Hoshin Kanri implementation: development and discussion

Hoshin Kanri is a strategic management framework originally conceived in Japan and recognised for developing a deployment process that integrates business strategy and operations execution. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest regarding Hoshin Kanri implementation among western managers, who usually face cultural challenges towards its use. This leads to the necessity of systematising a set of universally applicable guiding principles or guidelines, for Hoshin Kanri initiatives. This paper presents the results of an in-depth assessment of Hoshin Kanri guidelines carried out through a systematic process of experts? interviews. It uses as its starting point a model of the guidelines that was previously developed through a systematic literature review. The revising and refining of the guidelines is carried out by discussing their conceptual foundations and 20 guidelines are presented that may aid in the implementation of Hoshin Kanri in dfferent types of organisations.     

Effect of tool sharing on the reliability of flexible manufacturing systems

A manufacturer invests on FMS to enhance the availability of resources in order to maintain uninterrupted production. Tool failures pose a major obstacle to this objective. In this paper, a mathematical model has been developed to determine the spares requirement of the tooling system in FMS, so that a desired tooling system reliability is achieved while overall tooling cost is minimized. The influence of tool sharing on cost, reliability, spares requirement and tool magazine capacity of the FMS are analysed. The tools and tool transporter are subject to general failure distributions.     

Three dimensions of effective mission implementation

Mission statements are generally considered an important tool for strategy implementation. However, several authors have shown that there is a ‘hole’ in the mission theory, which in practice explains the inconsistency in mission statements in many companies because of the lack of motivation related to the mission. This article aims to bridge this gap by analysing the relationship between the mission of a company and its members' motivation. It entails an extension of the mission theory, in which three dimensions of mission development are analysed: formal, dynamic and motivational. On the basis of this framework, three forms of mission consistency are considered to explain the effectiveness of mission implementation: authenticity, coherence and integrity.