Design of Manufacturing Cells: PFA Applications in Dutch Industry

Abstract

Cellular manufacturing (CM) can be defined as the grouping of people and processes into specific areas dedicated to the production of a family of parts. There is a growing interest for CM in industry. In the last two decades many firms in the Netherlands as well as in other countries have implemented CM. Though the principle of CM in each firm will be basically the same, there may be considerable differences with respect to the characteristics of the cells. Table 1 presents seven firms in the Netherlands which have completely cellularized their manufacturing departments (see Slomp, Molleman and Gaalman 1993). As can be seen, these departments differ in terms of product types, the number of employees, number of manufacturing cells, number of different part types, and the number of bottleneck parts (i.e., parts that have to be manufactured in more than one cell). It is furthermore informative to know that in cases A, B, D, E, and F the manufacturing activities are based on forecast and planning. In cases C and G the manufacturing activities are customer order driven. This distinction has an impact on the performance objectives in each case. Table 2 lists some main characteristics of the manufacturing cells of the firms. These illustrate the variety of cells with respect to the number of machines, the type of material flow, the degree of automation, and the nature of the bottleneck capacity.