Effective material flow at an assembly facility

Abstract

Effective material flow in an assembly facility leads to reduced material handling costs and increased productivity. This research focuses on improving the flow of materials for an assembly facility that receives supplied parts through receiving docks and transfers the parts to material storage locations and then to part usage locations. The locations of the receiving docks, storage locations, and line locations are predetermined, but the assignment of parts to dock locations and storage locations and the material flow paths through the facility are decision variables. Furthermore, design decisions such as the dock strategy employed and the configuration of the storage areas lead to additional decision variables. The goal is to reduce overall material handling costs by effectively receiving, storing and transferring the material from loading docks to line locations. The contribution of this research is in applying multi-commodity network flow models that integrate many of the sub-problems that are assumed to be solved a priori in many existing models. This integrated approach was used to evaluate configuration changes for a collaborating facility. One of the scenarios analysed showed an improvement in the material handling costs of nearly 10% as compared to current practices.