Some Economic Aspects of Cellular Manufacture

Abstract

The concept of Group Technology (GT) has been used in European industries for many years, firstly as a possible cure to certain problems such as those associated with machine shop operation, but now it is thought of more in terms of a total manufacturing system covering all aspects and sections of the company, and not only the section where the problems appeared to originate. The idea of suggesting GT as a possible solution for many problems associated with the engineering industry have usually formed an attractive proposition, but due to the different peculiarity of these problems, it is very important to evaluate each case individually so that maximum benefit could be obtained. Component families and ‘machine groupings have always been at the core of the GT philosophy for manufacturing systems and many disagreements have been voiced in the literature over how this process should best be carried through. The formation of cells has not been widely reported and it would seem that the most common criteria of grouping is machine utilization which has not been adequately defined as to what is meant by an acceptable level of machine utilization in a cell. In this thesis unit cost of items produced in a cell is put forward as a viable and attractive method of assessing cell design and operation. However to be truly effective it must be possible to consider a range of cell designs for unit cost comparison purposes, and a technique based on (P.F.A.) using the Clustan computer analysis has been successfully developed for this purpose. Hence it is possible to consider a large number of cell designs ranging from each machine as one cell to all machines as one cell together with various family groupings. This provides a very powerful analytical tool for manufacturing system design which is fully illustrated by its application to a case study from the engineering industry.