Flexible Manufacturing Systems Performance Analysis and Improvement

Abstract

Due to the intense market competition, managements of manufacturing industries are striving to optimize their manufacturing lead times, enhance quality of products, increase part variety, and reduce production cost. Thus, the trend towards market globalization requires these manufacturing environments to be designed, analyzed for its performance and improved in such way that it can cater the market place challenges to survive and grow in the sector. In this paper a case study of Hibret Manufacturing & Machine Building Industry (HMMBBI) in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) shop is presented. The goal of the study is to analyze the performance of FMS and propose a performance improvement method. Analytical methods of performance analysis-bottleneck model and its extension called \textquoteleft{}extended bottleneck model\textquoteright{} are applied to determine the current production rate and the percentage workstations utilization of the existing FMS shop. The proposed FMS with balanced workloads between workstations has shown a significant improvement in percentage utilization of workstations, production lead time and as well as production throughput.