Design quality: The untapped potential of group technology

Abstract

Publisher Summary The impact of group technology (GT) on domestic manufacturing firms has been essentially limited to two of its basic applications. First is the process of restructuring the shop floor to a cellular layout. Identification of part families and machine cells dedicated to their manufacture has demonstrated great potential for productivity improvement. The most common usage of classification and coding systems is for the retrieval of designs (from the design database) to be used as the basis for new designs and for determining part families and cells. This chapter considers an expansion of the domain of the retrieval-oriented application of these classification and coding systems. The notion is of fully utilizing the information contained within the firm's various databases to enable design evaluation and control design retrieval in a manner consistent with design quality objectives. The operational form of such an application, as well as some of the benefits and technical obstacles, is discussed in the chapter. The GT code-based design retrieval capability induces a rather painless form of design standardization. The chapter discusses management of the design function and the design database, managing design quality through management of the engineering design database, and managing manufacturing costs through reference to the engineering design database. In this chapter, the expansion of the application domain of GT-oriented coding and retrieval systems has been proposed.