ENG665D2 Manufacturing Systems For the Material Flow Assignment

1 Describe, compare and contrast business and technology systems relevant to contemporary manufacturing.

2 Apply structured approaches to the analysis of manufacturing systems.

3 Apply analytical techniques to obtain quantitative solutions to manufacturing activity.

4 Make proposals for the design of manufacturing systems.

5 Evaluate a strategy for manufacture and assembly with respect to quantity, quality and reliability.

Answers:

To obtain the optimal layout, firstly, the following shall be considered:

• The cost of material transfers between departments
• Quality of manufactured products
• Production throughput
• Total facilities management across all departments including material flow, handling and human-work relationship.

Therefore, the following might be achieved if the proposed layout could be implemented:

Decreased material flow hence saving on time and costs

Improved work place safety and ergonomics

Increased productivity of the workers

Improved product quality

Therefore, systematic layout planning can be used to analyze the available data:

1. Create the list of departments with their required sizes

The degree of closeness is proportional to the extent of material exchange

For zero material exchange, assign an X or U

Some logical reasoning will also be applied to establish the degree of closeness:

The total closeness rating

 

(ii) Potential Problems in the new layout:

The material flow does not happen in a perfectly straight and forward fashion. There are possible backtracking and crisscrossing hence economically, the time and resources are not efficiently being harnessed.

The transportation costs of materials can also be prohibitive in this layout as materials are moved from one department to another in a haphazard fashion (note: the closeness between departments is difficult to perfectly establish, a compromise must therefore be reached).

The departmentalization aspect of the layout makes it harder for workers to perfectly work as a team as there are always tendencies to incline more to their individual departments

Effective communication and information flow may not be possible with this kind of layout. For instance slower response to product quality issues may slightly take longer; unlike in group technology where quality issues can easily be dealt with within the production unit

Implementing such a layout can be very expensive as each department requires to be installed with more than one machine, for instance, more than one milling machine is required in the milling department to ensure the various batch quantities are produced.

Due to departmentalization, opportunity for workers to be equipped with various skills may be practically impossible hence affecting job satisfaction.

However, the layout has some advantages:

Material flow distances between departments are reduced as the departments which are functionally close are placed adjacently.

Smooth control and supervision can be achieved thanks to the departmentalization of the layout.

Breakdown of any machine does not affect overall production in the long run

Lastly, the layout is more flexible as its design can allow different volume productions and product ranges.

Possible investment to be added:

A cellular manufacturing system is highly recommended for this case. Most of the production departments are functionally similar hence can easily be grouped into cells (Script, no year). For instance, we can have a machine workshop cell where milling, turning and grinding are all done in the cell. The number of machine workshop cells will depend on the production capacity and the product demand.

Hence, by grouping the functionally similar departments, the following can be achieved:

Reduced material handling and flow across the departments hence minimizing cost and time

The workers can now be equipped with various skills as job rotation within the cell is possible hence ensuring job satisfaction

Rapid information and communication flow ensures work-related issues are effectively dealt with within the unit. For instance, product quality improvements can easily be achieved.

There are no backtracking and crisscrossing of the materials during production minimizing costs and time

The system is also highly flexible with a possibility to integrate automatic flexible manufacturing systems

The system has the best production throughput as the bottlenecks during production are now minimized.

Problems with application of FMS system:

The cost implications associated with this system can be very prohibitive. Firstly, one needs to invest heavily in planning for design, purchase, installation, integration with various software and maintenance of the same. Then, implementing the system is another herculean task. The return on investment greatly depends on the FMS planning and design.

There is normally low acceptability by the workers. FMS is mostly viewed negatively by the workers. Actually, the system revolutionizes virtually everything when implemented. The skills requirements become more sophisticated. Sometimes, restructuring of the existing human resource is a requirement to ensure smooth integration and adaptability of the system. This may not auger well with the unskilled or low skilled workers as the system requires specialized skills to operate and maintain (Ojaghia et al, 2015).

The system is normally limited to a special class of products: Long range products based on sizes, patterns, volumes can suitably be manufactured using this system. It is not possible to implement FMS to continuous/flow production, for instance milk processing.

Due to the cost of establishing the systems, smaller companies may not be able to implement it as the return on investment depends on the revenue to be generated once they are installed.

The system is also very complex. Supervision and control would require additional investment in the relevant technology to monitor real time condition of the system. Besides, due to the specialized skills requirement, any company implementing such a system must also be ready to foot higher costs of labour.

Operation Routing

The similarity coefficient based-approach is based on identifying machines which are used more or less for the same parts and therefore grouping technology can easily be applied (Yin, 2006).

Hence, let n_i = number of parts visiting machine

Nij ₌ Numeber of parts visiting machines i and j

Hence the similarity coefficient S_ij = max{n_ij/n_i}: first compute: n_i

Table 2: n_i computed values

Table 3: Computed values of n_ij

Table 4:  Sij computed values:

References

Ojaghia, Y…et al. (2015). Production Layout Optimization for Small and Medium Scale Food Industry. Online journal. Available at : https://ac.els-cdn.com/S2212827114008634/1-s2.0-S2212827114008634-main.pdf?_tid=a999bdd4-1095-11e7-be79-00000aab0f26&acdnat=1490362244_e4e9352b0de637152f9378bff814882c

Script Insel. (no date). Group Technology / Cellular Manufacturing. Available at : https://prolog.univie.ac.at/teaching/LVAs/Layout_und_Design/SS09/Skript%20insel.pdf

Yin, Y. (2006).  Application Similarity Coefficient Method to Cellular Manufacturing. Available at: https://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/414.pdf