SENSITIVITY V ANALYSIS OF THE PERFORMANCE OF A • CELLULAR MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

Abstract

In recent decades, the most significant transformation in batch type manufacturing is the emergence of cellular manufacturing which is a viable alternative to jobshop manufacturing. To satisfy customer's changing demand for product variety and quality in order to remain competitively successful and to increase the productivity. For optimal positioning in terms of cost and delivery lead time implementation of the cellular manufacturing is needed. The success of the cellular manufacturing is depicted by simply providing the percent improvement in various performance measures like throughput time, WIP inventory, setup time, machine utilisation, flow time, labour cost etc. In this dissertation, the sensitivity analysis of the performance of the cellular manufacturing with respect to change in the product mix has been conducted to calculate the flexibility range of a cellular manufacturing system. By taking a manufacturing system consisting of 36 machines and 15 parts, a comparison of cellular manufacturing and jobshop manufacturing systems has also been made in terms of performance measures like mean flow time and WIP inventory in order to calculate the capability of the cellular manufacturing system.