Manufacturing competitiveness assessment for business excellence

A manufacturing system is considered, which produces 30 products using 17 conventional machines and different process plans for each product. The system accepts customer orders for any combination of these products. These orders received from time to time may relate to different combinations of the products of varying quantities. The system is simulated using ProModel 6.2 and the exercise helped in quantifying how the manufacturing system would perform under different scenarios characterised by the combinations of various operational features. The performance of the system is measured using performance measures such as machine utilisation, throughput time, product earliness, product lateness and product block time. Nine different alternative configurations were developed and simulated. A benchmarking exercise was performed using simulated results. The analysis led to some interesting inferences, which appear to extend good support to reconfigurable manufacturing system literature. The details of the simulation model, analysis of the results and the inferences drawn are presented in this paper.