The total manufacturing cost for a part is determined by its process plan, and the total cost includes both processing and material handling costs. This research examines the cost impact of assuming an arbitrary layout when evaluating alternative process plans for production in a new facility. A designed experiment was...
Small and medium-sized enterprises that are characterized by high-mix, low-volume, and highly variable production operations often have unstructured material movement processes that are prone to material handling wastes. These sub-optimal material handling systems are oftentimes a result of small and medium-sized enterprise's limited resources. Current tools to assist organizations in...
Cellular Manufacturing Systems (CMS) have claimed many advantages over traditional job shop processes. Some of the advantages reported by several users of CMS are reduction in throughput time, reduction in WIP inventory, improvement in product quality, faster response time to customer orders, shorter move distances, increase in manufacturing flexibility, and...