Shop Floor Activities Research Articles

A scrumban board-based approach to improve material flow in engineering to order (ETO) companies: an industrial application based on action research

This paper focuses on lean management in Engineering-To-Order (ETO) companies. The objective is to streamline the management of an order and to reduce the time to market, from order acceptance to delivery. To this aim, we propose a visual tool that allows a better organisation and coordination of all the activities carried out by the departments involved in the management of an order. The proposed tool is a readaptation of the ‘scrumban’ methodology, which originated from an ‘action research-based project’, carried on in cooperation with an important ETO manufacturer. Specifically, using this implementation as use case, the proposed tool and its benefits are analysed in detail, showing that it allows to: (i) reorganise and operate the shop floor in a lean way, (ii) encourage a continuous improvement of the manufacturing processes and, above all, (iii) achieve a full coordination of physical and information flows. A step-by-step implementation framework is also provided, aiming to support and guide managers and practitioners willing to introduce visual tools, for a lean-oriented management of shop floor activities in ETO.

Integration of RFID strategic value attributes mechanism decision in apparel supply chain: fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS approach

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify the radio frequency identification (RFID) strategic value attributes (RFIDSVAs) mechanism selections preferences and also integration of RFID tags with technology coordination tools (IRTWTCTs) alternatives ranking performance decisions in supply chain management (SCM). RFID-enabled techno-economic feasibility decisions are enhancing the SC visibility in apparel supply chains (ASCs). The RFIDSVAs mechanism selections have performed significant agility to strategic competitive advantages, namely, inventory visibility, multi-tags ownership transfer within trusted third party, etc.Design/methodology/approachFuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) and FAHP-fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS) approaches have been used to evaluate the quantitative assessment of RFIDSVA mechanisms selection decision based on weight priority orders and IRTWTCTs alternatives selection in ASC networks. The comparison of FAHP and FAHP-FTOPSIS approaches to evaluate the integrated framework develop in RFIDSVAs mechanisms and IRTWTCTs alternatives selection decisions in Indian multi-tier ASC networks.FindingsThe result found that the FAHP-FTOPSIS approaches have used to prioritizing the RFIDSVA mechanism selection weights and also identify the IRTWTCTs alternatives ranking preferences order in apparel SCM. The comparison between the FAHP and FAHP-FTOPSIS approach to quantitative assessments from RFIDSVA mechanisms and IRTWTCTs alternatives selection decisions, which enable them SC agility potential across multi-tier visibility in ASC networks. ASC stakeholders can be benefited by techno-economic feasibility decisions, RFID-enabled shop floor activities, multi-tags ownerships transfer in SCs and knowledge-based cryptography tags/items separation in SCs.Research limitations/implicationsThe research work has considered only five RFIDSVA mechanisms and also three integration of RFIDTWTCTs alternatives in multi-tier ASC. The strategic competitive advantages are achieved by RFID-enabled break-even tags price decisions and also techno-economic feasibility decision by contractual design multi-tier SC stakeholder’s involvements.Practical implicationsThe pilot project study explores that the quantitative assessment decision has based on RFID-enable techno-economic feasibility in ASCs. Stakeholders can be benefited by inventory control of the financial losses, reducing the inventory inaccuracies and multi-tags ownership transfer within trusted third-party traceability in ASC networks.Originality/valueThis study explores the RFID-enabled apparel SC process and activities visibility (natural fibre’s fibre producer, fibre dyeing producer, yarn spinning producer, knitting and finishing producer).

Assessing operational complexity of manufacturing systems based on algorithmic complexity of key performance indicator time-series

This article presents an approach to the assessment of operational manufacturing systems complexity based on the irregularities hidden in manufacturing key performance indicator time-series by employing three complementary algorithmic complexity measures: Kolmogorov complexity, Kolmogorov complexity spectrum’s highest value and overall Kolmogorov complexity. A series of computer simulations derived from discrete manufacturing systems are used to investigate the measures’ potentiality. The results showed that the presented measures can be used in quantitatively identifying operational system complexity, thereby supporting operational shop-floor decision-making activities.

Line Balancing and Layout Model for Productivity Improvement in Leather Footwear Industry

The government of Ethiopia considers the leather footwear industry as one of the priority sector that is capable of accelerating economic development by creating more employment opportunities. However, the industry’s contribution to the national economy so far is not enjoyable as productivity of the industry is much lower qualitatively, quantitatively and value-wise. The focal constraint against performance of the industry is the existence of bottleneck process in the production line. The major ones are pile up of ‘UPPER’ (i.e. upper part of a shoe) at some points, because of unequal workload distribution among workstations. Accordingly, the main objective of this study is to improve the production line efficiency through line balancing technique that is demonstrated by taking Peacock shoe factory as a case study. The study considered ‘Bades shoe model’ to investigate the production line in the Stitching department. Data were collected through direct data intake from the shop-floor activities and company’s database. A well-prepared templates and stopwatch were used for the data collection. The analysis was carried out through the logic of modular system. This system uses work sharing method in which cross-trained workers perform multiple tasks to eliminate bottleneck processes and balance workloads among workstations. Furthermore, the study proposed a layout model to balance the production line. The results suggest that the production line efficiency is improved from 68.89% to 87.6%, and the labor productivity is increased from 16.67 to 23.44. The findings provide important insights into productivity improvements by creating smooth flow of components in assembly lines. Keywords: Ethiopia, leather footwear, bottleneck process, line balancing. DOI: 10.7176/IEL/10-2-03 Publication date: March 31 st 2020

Benefits of Implementing Sustainable Business Practices for the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry

The Brundtland Commission 1987 has defined sustainable development as “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. The Indian Pharmaceutical Industry has realised the importance of sustainable development and has started taking steps in integrating the same in the business operations. Companies have started integrating the sustainability principles in their business processes starting right from strategic thinking and going down to shop floor activities. The present study is based on data collected from 24 top companies from the pharmaceutical sector to understand the benefits that they get from implementing sustainable business practices in their strategic management process and their day-to day operations as well. Companies have realised that other than long term sustainability and economic development, practicing sustainability also has various other benefits such as competitive advantage, satisfaction of stakeholders, positive customer feedback, reduction in employee turnover, improved brand image, etc.

An Efficient Operations Management Strategy Using Fuzzy Logic Decision Making Based Shop Floor Control Technique

In any organization, shop floor control seems to be a vital and pivotal activity and effective shop floor control paves the way for cent percent production. Effective utilization of resources, proper production planning, and successful maintenance would always pave the way for high productivity which in turn fulfills the commitment to meet out the delivery schedule for customers. Hence it is understood that continuous and consistent shop floor management demands a serious focus that contributes to sound operations management. More developments have taken place in the recent decade in framing new methodologies and adopting new advanced techniques to control the shop floor activities of an organization. The purposes of our paper is to bring out a new model for shop floor control using the Fuzzy Logic Decision Taking technique to help the operations professionals to enable them for successful professional decision making in shop floor control. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) Techniques have witnessed tremendous application in operations management. Our paper has successfully attempted to apply Fuzzy Logic Decision-Making Technique which is one among the various MCDM tools. The technique considers many factors like Production, Wastages, Breakdown or Idle Time etc and these factors are treated as criteria and upon using the tool, the Management Information System(MIS) reports generated after mathematical manipulation using Fuzzy Logic seems to be much useful for corporate decision making.

30 Do nice guys finish last?

Emergency medicine is widely recognised as an intense specialty. Interruptions are known to derail thoughts, increasing cognitive load and result in longer periods before deep thought is re-established. Although approachability...

Cross-docking Operation Scheduling: Truck Arrivals, Shop-Floor Activities and Truck Departures

Cross-docking is a relatively new logistic strategy which seeks to make economies in transportation, decrease lead time and reduce inventory. The main principle is to unload, sort, consolidate and transfer delivered packages from inbound trucks to outbound trucks, with a minimum of storage or treatment in between. Two key issues associated to this field are the truck scheduling and the shop-floor operation scheduling. We propose a mixed integer linear programming model to schedule truck arrivals, shop-floor activities and truck departures. The cross-dock configuration we study is based on an industrial case on the automotive industry. In particular, a repack operation and two temporary storage zones are considered. The objective is to minimize internal operation cost (penalty related to extra capacity needs) and outbound transportation cost (number of trucks). The model is implemented and tested in CPLEX with small size instances, based on industrial data. The proposed model could be easily adapted to a variety of cross-dock configurations, in terms of internal capacity and cost distribution.

The Ratio-Delay Method of the Manufacturing System Analysis

This paper describes the application of a ratio-delay to a study of operations of mechanical Job-Shop production in Samara factory. To analyze the operations efficiency it may be necessary to obtain organizational and technical data in each job stages. In fact, ratio-delay is an effective tool to determine direct labor productivity for shop floor activities. In the context of manufacturing operations, ratio-delay can determine productivity levels as a baseline that provides focus for new “industrial engineered” improvement measures of complex re-engineering project or lean management.

Walking around the pyramids: Managers’ shop-floor activities in Lean-inspired organizations

The approach in this article is to study leadership activities from the shop-floor workers’ perspectives during the implementation of a Lean-inspired production concept – an angle of approach that corresponds to a need for a deeper knowledge of the interactions between organizational structures and the physical work environment. The empirical findings are from a national R&D program called the Production Leap and collected through different methods: semi-structured interviews carried out at eight manufacturing companies, the open-ended part of a longitudinal survey, and participative observations. Lean leadership practices at these companies do not enable the possibilities of developing the technical systems or work relationships between the managers and the shop-floor workers. Instead, they provide the means and activities to circumvent coordination problems and create a feeling of participation. The results here indicate that leadership activities and coordination of work do not, as it is sometimes argued by the proponents of Lean, ‘turn the pyramid’ of power upside down. One reason for this is the lack of social structures in the organization.

Production monitoring system development and modification

Main attention of this paper is paid to the development of a simple, but efficient concept of a real time production monitoring system. The goal is to offer an effective concept, which will help to provide an accurate overview of the shop floor activities by diverse information appearance and improve asset management, machinery utilization, and production process stability. The subtask considered includes description of the design of a visual module for the proposed production monitoring system for a certain type of micro, small and medium sized enterprises.

Implementing Lean Techniques on the Shop Floor Improvement of a Delivery Company

CTC Express is the leading domestic company in delivery service and wants to improve their business efficiency by establishing lean management in the shop floor activities. Lean management is generally adopted by the manufacturing industries as a significant technique to reduce waste and operation costs. This paper investigates the continuous improvement through value stream mapping, begins with describing the current situation and proposes the future condition. Several improvements were implemented in the company such as the transformation of automation process, better result in visual control and standardization processes. The new proposed system has shown being able to reduce the works of loading/unloading and in the same time to increase the performance of material handling in each cycle time.

RFID technology for increasing visibility in ETO supply chains: a case study

This paper presents the application of an innovative system for increasing visibility along an Engineer-To-Order supply chain. The system has been applied in a leading Italian company that manufactures vessels and tube heat exchangers. By means of this method, the company shares information about its shop floor activities with other actors in the supply chain, i.e. clients and suppliers. The system elements are as follows: Radio-frequency identification transponders (to identify either components, operators, tooling machines (e.g. welding machines) or production phases), a Wi-Fi network (to communicate data) and a web-based application that is accessible by the company’s clients. This paper shows the methodology that is used to define the system’s architecture and the technical solutions adopted. Benefits in terms of reduction in costs for monitoring and control have been observed. Moreover, customers perceived the increased visibility of the production process to be a valuable service.

Customer Order Management in Service Oriented Holonic Manufacturing

One of the most important problems when considering the design of manufacturing systems based on SOA paradigms is the integration of shop floor activities in the business processes at enterprise level. This paper presents the design and implementation of a web service abstraction layer for holonic manufacturing systems that allow business process orchestration of customer order management module. It focuses on enhancements implemented for the NetLogo tool by adding both incoming and outgoing Web Services capabilities and discusses the technical solutions for this integration. An example is being provided for the integration and testing of a business process against the considered environment.

A simulation testing and analysis of aggregate production planning strategies

In this study, a hybrid discrete event simulation (DES) and system dynamics (SD) methodology is applied to model and simulate aggregate production planning (APP) problem for the first time. DES is used to simulate operational-level and shop-floor activities incorporated into APP and estimate critical time-based control parameters used in SD model of APP and SD is used to simulate APP as a collection of aggregate-level strategic decisions. The main objective of this study is to determine and analyse the effectiveness of APP strategies regarding the Total Profit criterion by developing a hybrid DES–SD simulation model for APP in a real-world manufacturing company. The simulation results demonstrated that the priority of APP strategies with regards to Total Profit criterion is: (1) the pure chase strategy, (2) the modified chase strategy, (3) the pure level strategy, (4) the modified level strategy, (5) the mixed strategy and (6) the demand management strategy, respectively. The APP system is first simulated under mixed strategy (basic scenario) conditions to include all APP capacity and demand options in constructed SD simulation model to show a comprehensive view of APP components and their interdependent interactions. Then, the obtained results will be used as Total Profit measure to compare with system's performance under some experimental scenarios applying different APP strategies.

Flexible manufacturing systems modelling and performance evaluation using AutoMod

In recent times flexible manufacturing systems emerged as a powerful technology to meet the continuous changing customer demands. Increase in the performance of flexible manufacturing systems is expected as a result of integration of the shop floor activities such as machine and vehicle scheduling. The authors made an attempt to integrate machine and vehicle scheduling with an objective to minimize the makespan using Automod. Automod is a discrete event simulation package used to model and simulate a wide variety of issues in automated manufacturing systems. The key issues related to the design and operation of automated guided vehicles such as flow path layout, number of vehicles and traffic control problems are considered in the study. The performance measures like throughput, machine and vehicle utilization are studied for different job dispatching and vehicle assignment rules in different flexible manufacturing system configurations.

Supporting agile supply chains using a service-oriented shop floor

The globalized nature of current business environments led to the emergence of new networked enterprise organizational paradigms (supply chains, extended enterprises, virtual enterprises, collaborative networks, etc.) to meet changing requirements and tackle profitable but volatile opportunities overall agility is required. Eventually the shop floor will have to react and accommodate (re)adjustments in the supply chain making it an important piece in the competitiveness puzzle. So far, the research focus has been in high level aspects of supply chain management and the integration of shop floor activities in the process has been left relatively unattended. However, shop floor data is increasingly required in business tools that support decision making. In this context, failing to support agility at shop floor level can compromise the agility of the supply chain. Recent developments in networked information technologies and embedded devices allow enabling intelligence in shop floor rendering it an active and live entity that further enhances the dynamics of the supply chain. The goal of the present work, supported by an implemented test case in the assembly domain, is to demonstrate how one is able to seamless integrate the shop floor with external tools and achieve a highly reconfigurable environment that adapts to changing production requirements and disturbances using service-oriented technology.

An integrated scheme for process planning and scheduling in FMS

Process planning and scheduling are the two important manufacturing functions involved in any shop floor activities. As functional integration is essential to realize the benefits of computer integrated manufacturing, a scheme for integration of process planning and scheduling has been introduced in this paper. The proposed scheme can be implemented in a company with existing process planning and scheduling departments when multiple process plans remain available on the shop floor. It consists of two main modules, introduced in detail in this paper. They are process plan selection module and scheduling module.

A hybrid knowledge discovery model using decision tree and neural network for selecting dispatching rules of a semiconductor final testing factory

One of the most challenging production decisions in the semiconductor testing industry is to select the most appropriate dispatching rule which can be employed on the shop floor to achieve high manufacturing performance against a changing environment. Job dispatching in the semiconductor final testing industry is severely constrained by many resources conflicts and has to fulfil a changing performance required by customers and plant managers. In this study we have developed a hybrid knowledge discovery model, using a combination of a decision tree and a back-propagation neural network, to determine an appropriate dispatching rule using production data with noise information, and to predict its performance. We built an object-oriented simulation model to mimic shop floor activities of a semiconductor testing plant and collected system status and resultant performances of several typical dispatching rules, earliest-due-date (EDD) rule, first-come-first-served rule, and a practical dispatching heuristic taking set-up reduction into consideration. Performances such as work-in-process, set-up overhead, completion time, and tardiness are examined. Experiments have shown that the proposed decision tree found the most suitable dispatching rule given a specific performance measure and system status, and the back propagation neural network then predicted precisely the performance of the selected rule.

Becoming empowered: organization change in a telecom company

The notion of empowerment has been used in the management discourse since at least the 1980s. As a normative model for the distribution of decision-making mandate and administrative and operative responsibilities, empowerment serves as a new shopfloor model or ideology for decentralized organizations of the new workplace. The practice of empowerment is, however, not very often empirically researched, causing a confusion about what empowerment implies in terms of shopfloor activities. This paper presents an extensive organization development programme at a Swedish telecommunication company. Rather than being an easily implemented model, empowerment appears as a complex, heterogeneous process in which the empowering of employees is embedded in local practices and workplace cultures.