This research studied the effects of changing from a traditional manufacturing
system to a cell manufacturing system in a value-added wood products company.
Discrete event simulation was used to describe the current system and the proposed
new systems. Parts were separated into part families that shared similar processing
requirements. From...
The slow productivity growth of American organizations in comparison to that of other industrialized nations is, nowadays, causing great national concern. The time has come when traditional industrial practices must give way to innovative procedures more compatible with current business-world conditions. Among others, current managerial
practices seem to need urgent...
The importance of integrating design and manufacturing becomes apparent when the increase in the degree of difficulty of change is observed as the product development proceeds from concept to production in a serial engineering process. The greatest opportunity in design for manufacture occurs at the initial design stage before any...
This study presents the results of using common two or three-parameter "default" distributions in place of "best fit distributions" in simulations of serial production lines with finite buffers and blocking. The default distributions used instead of the best-fit distribution are chosen such that they are non-negative, unbounded, and can match...
The Production Switching Heuristic (PSH) developed by
Mellichamp and Love (1978) has been suggested as a more
realistic, practical and intuitively appealing approach to
aggregate production planning (APP). In this research, PSH
has been modified to present a more sophisticated open grid
search procedure for solving the APP problem. The...
The objective of this study was to identify usage of foodservice performance
measures, important activities in foodservice benchmarking, and benchmarking
attitudes, beliefs, and practices by foodservice directors. The design of this study
included two parts: (1) eleven expert panelists involved in a Delphi technique to
identify and rate importance of...
Poor material utilization is inherent to conventional manufacturing processes, leading to high material waste and machining times. Additive manufacturing processes attempt to solve this issue by allowing production of near-net shapes, but the processes may be too expensive or infeasible. By leveraging both processes in a single part, the waste...
The optimal allocation of buffers in serial production systems is one of the oldest and most researched problems in Industrial Engineering. In general, there are three main approaches to the buffer allocation problem when the objective is to maximize throughput. The first is basically a systematic trial and error procedure...
To be competitive in domestic and international markets, manufacturing management is routinely faced with the decision to automate or replace existing production facilities with advanced manufacturing technologies. Installation of advanced manufacturing technologies requires high capital investment, and there is much evidence to suggest that automation for automation's sake has proven...
Physical distribution is one of the key functions in logistics systems, involving the flow of products from manufacturing plants or distribution centers through the network of transportation to consumers. The function is very costly, especially for the distribution industries. During the past decades, the significance of physical distribution has increased...