Case study: reconfiguring a manufacturing system for strategic advantage ‐ a real‐world application

Abstract

Over the last ten years scores of methodologies have emerged in management science/operations research/statistics that employ techniques such as mathematical programming, simulation, artificial intelligence, and clustering to convert a flexible manufacturing system into a cellular one. Based on a real‐life case that involved over 1,000 components and 3,000 operations, related to a world‐class furniture manufacturing company, finds that the somewhat outdated King’s algorithm, after partial linearization, works as well as the other sophisticated techniques in terms of speed and problem size. Drives home the point that a shift to cellular configuration from functional layout results in across the board savings in material movement, setup times, hilo moves, WIP, work area and in manufacturing leadtime. The company under study benefited to the tune of $164,000 per year from switch to single cell. The projected savings are expected to exceed $700,000 per year when the reconfiguration is completed.

Citation

Kumar, A. and Motwani, J. (1998), "Case study: reconfiguring a manufacturing system for strategic advantage ‐ a real‐world application", Logistics Information Management, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 244-256. https://doi.org/10.1108/09576059810226802