Cell design, management and continuous improvement

Abstract

A cellular manufacturing system is a shop floor that has been organised into groups of dissimilar machines producing groups of similar parts. Each group of machines is called a cell and each group of parts is called a part family. The main advantage of a cellular manufacturing system is low material handling, since ideally, a part need only travel to the cell it belongs to in order to be manufactured. If a cell can manufacture its part family without any member of that part family having to travel to another cell, then that cell is said to be independent. In reality, cells are rarely independent and this causes many complications when trying to design a cellular manufacturing system. To address these complications, a strategy for cell design, management and continuous improvement was developed. This comprises three stages: (i) Determine cell configurations. (ii) Position cells and the workstations within them. (iii) Carry out Capability Analysis to identify targets for continuous improvement. Black Box Clustering is used to determine cell configurations by clustering a workstation-part matrix representation of routings. The Cellect layout tools identify the best position for each cell and the relative positions of the workstations within them based on material handling costs. This data combined with user interaction can be used to identify the precise locations of individual workstations. Capability Analysis is a methodology developed to assess groups of performance measures that should be