A comparison of focused cellular manufacturing to cellular manufacturing and job shop

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to compare a focused cellular manufacturing environment with traditional cellular manufacturing, and job shop environments. We define focused cellular manufacturing as a configuration scheme that groups components by end-items and forms cells of machines to fabricate and assemble end-items. In addition, this research includes three levels of batch sizes and two levels of set-up times in its performance criteria which few researchers in this area have done. The results indicate that the focused cellular manufacturing scheme has a batching advantage. This advantage dominated the balanced machine utilization benefit of the job shop configuration scheme and out weighed the set-up time reduction advantage of the cellular manufacturing scheme for average end-item completion times and average work-in-process inventory levels. The cellular manufacturing and job shop schemes overcame the batch size advantage only when batch sizes were small or set-up times were large.