Production Flow Analysis

Production Flow Analysis (PFA) was established by J. Burbidge to solve out the family- formation problem for manufacturing cell design. This analysis utilizes the information contained on production route sheets. Work parts with similar or identical routing are classified into part families that can be utilized to form logical machine cells in a group technology layout. Since PFA uses manufacturing data instead of design data to recognize part families, it might overcome two possible abnormalities that might occur in part classification & coding.

Primary, parts whose basic geometries are rather different may nevertheless require identical or similar process routing. Second, parts whose geometries are rather similar might nevertheless require process routing which is quite different.