Shop floor performance measurement – a case study in injection moulding industry

Abstract

Shop floor is the key decision that determines the long-run efficiency of operations, especially in a manufacturing operation. Thus it is necessary to measure the performance of the shop floor in order to increase the competitiveness of a company. However, performance measurement is not an easy task because companies must decide what kind of measurement criteria they should take into consideration and to assess the performance according to these criteria. In this paper, an integrated methodology is proposed to measure the performance of the shop floor. This paper attempts to demonstrate the use of combination of simulation and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to measure the performance of the shop floor in a moulding industry. In this case study, four performance measures included injection moulding machine utilisation, operator utilisation, earliness/lateness and throughput rate were chosen to be the measurement criteria. The methodology shows that the performance of the shop floor can be evaluated through the process. It shows the effect of the selected criteria in influencing the performance of the shop floor. This paper tries to reduce the gap between virtual performance and actual performance in the shop floor performance measurement problem.