Organisations need flexibility to accomplish their tasks and support functions, and achieve desired outputs, while accommodating to the changes in business markets. For this, they adopt a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). This helps manufacturing organisations in producing a variety of goods in flexible quantities with less/no human intervention.
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Categories of Flexible Manufacturing System
Generally, flexibility in an FMS falls in two categories:
Machine flexibility
It denotes a flexibility type that allows a machine to perform different operations. In this kind of flexibility, the system’s capability is modified to create new product types. This also allows the machines to change the order of operations on situational basis.
Routing flexibility
It denotes the various paths that a system could use to produce a product through machines and workshops. In other words, routing flexibility is the ability to use various machines to perform the same operation and absorb changes occurred at a large scale. For example, change in production volume, capacity or capability.
Main Attributes of FMS
The main attributes of FMS are given as follows:
- In FMS, functions, such as tool identification, inspection and correction are automated.
- In spite of manufacturing in batches, FMS enables organisations to indulge in large-scale production.
- It allows changes in production as per requirements.
- Due to automation of the manufacturing system, FMS reduces material handling to a minimum.
FMS comes with numerous benefits for manufacturing organisations, such as low production costs, increased machine utilisation, reduced WIP inventory, short lead times and enhanced system reliability. However, the cost to implement FMS is generally high and requires automated machines; therefore, it is mostly used by large manufacturing organisations.
Group Technology
Group Technology (GT) is a manufacturing technique in which parts/ components having similarities in function, design and manufacturing are assembled together. Thus, by grouping similar tasks and problems, GT helps in increasing production efficiencies, reducing redundant activities and facilitating quick and timely information retrieval. The parts having similar design and manufacturing characteristics are collectively termed as a part family. Thus, these parts are manufactured together through a standardised process.
GT can be applied to all types of manufacturing environments. It is performed by carrying out the following activities:
- Coding: In this step, the similarities of parts are identified in the forms of codes. These similarities may include design characteristics and/or manufacturing characteristics.
- Classification: Here, part codes and related information are deployed to assign parts to families. In addition, machines are assigned to produce the parts.
Cellular Manufacturing Systems
Cellular manufacturing refers to a manufacturing process in which part families are produced within a line or cell of machines. These machines are mainly operated by those machinists who perform only within a line or cell. A cell is a small organisational unit that helps in exploiting similarities in information processing, creating products and serving customers. It is applied under group technology only and is regarded as an essential practice to achieve world-class manufacturing status.
The main aim of using this technology is to design cells to optimise the measures of performance, such as productivity and cycle time, unit cost, on-time delivery, lead time, error rates and percentage of parts made cell-complete.
The main benefits of using cellular technology are:
- Increased production and quality control through division of factory into small, homogeneous and unified productive units.
- Reduced material handling cost and time as there is no requirement for storing and controlling materials.
- Improved machine utilisation due to the deployment of a single machine to manufacture a variety of products in each cell.
- Decreased production lead time due to less time taken for setting up, material handling and improved machine utilisation.
- Condensed waste by reducing defects by eliminating processing and product changeovers.
Optimised Production Technology (OPT)
Optimised Production Technology (OPT) is a computer-based technique, introduced by Goldratt in 1986. It is used to schedule the resources and processes for optimising the overall production activities and maximising the profit. It aims at identifying bottlenecks or capacity constraints in production. Bottleneck is one process in a series of processes, which has limited capacity and ultimately reduces the capacity of the whole series of processes. OPT reduces bottlenecks in a system by optimising the throughput to increase profits.
OPT is implied through OPT software that helps in controlling complex manufacturing processes. The OPT software classifies the process and generates schedules and capacity plans by using the ‘OPT bottleneck forward-loading techniques’. The technique monitors the progress as per schedule and starts action to overcome gaps.
In this way, OPT schedules finite resources to achieve maximum manufacturing work effectiveness. Apart from this, OPT helps in:
- Resolving the key issues of bottlenecks
- Increasing profitability by optimising the throughput
- Reducing inventory and functioning costs
