Abstract
The production cycle (PC) time, as a very important economic indicator of freezing current assets, involves the time needed to manufacture a unit or a series of units, from putting them into production until they are put into storage; and yet it is rarely discussed in the literature, even though it should be also analysed and be made as short as possible. The goal of this article is to survey and control the methodology of reducing the PC time of components in the metalworking industry, grouped by factor analysis into the factors of production and non-production components, observed by a modified method of current observations, and viewed as a process whose effectiveness was monitored using control charts. The survey is based on data collected through 1,576 observations in a Serbian company that manufactures electrical and electronic equipment for motor vehicles. The 2012 results, when compared with those of 2011, indicate that the PC time is significantly reduced by 93 minutes, or by 28.53 per cent, and the manufacturing time by 46 minutes, or by 19.17 per cent. The results furnish empirical findings that provide insights into a number of managerial issues concerning investment decisions in product-specific cycle time improvements and reductions, together with process redesigns.
Highlights
Thinking in terms of product life cycles is one of the challenges facing manufacturers today
It has been shown that a modified method of work sampling, with time components gouped by factor analysis, is applicable in the domain of capacity utilisation observations, and in investigating production cycle (PC) in a metalworking industry with small-sized series, using small alterations
The specificity of the proposed method refers to machine utilisation observations that are not performed by shifts and days using current observations of machines, but through PC time components monitoring the items of work
Summary
Thinking in terms of product life cycles is one of the challenges facing manufacturers today. Manufacturers must offer a wide variety of products in a cost-effective manner, with quick responses to changes in product designs and volumes. Life cycle assessment is a very important issue, and must be elaborated in many directions in the decade: new databases should be developed, new impact assessment methods should be designed, and methods for uncertainty analysis should be improved [1]. With short set-up times, short production cycles – with small lots and inventories – become economical [2]. The lack of life cycle data for manufacturing processes is the main problem in the process of planning improvement [18], due to fact that gathering data for a cycle analysis is extremely resource- and time-intensive [6]
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