Cellular Manufacturing

Group Technology (GT) signifies a philosophical tool that attempts to analyze and to set up the parts into groups to take advantage of their similarities according to design & production procedure. On the basis of groups, families might be established for rationalizing the manufacturing procedure in the area of small & medium batch sizes of mass production of a big product mix. In the cut throat competition in the global market to meet the requirements of customers, manufacturers are forced to adopt the small batch production with big production mix as compared to from mass production paradigm.

To achieve these needs, manufacturers have to adopt the method of GT to generate small volume batches consisting of complicated parts in a short production period. GT philosophy is applied to organize a big portion of the manufacturing systems into cells, which leads to cellular manufacturing system.

GT might be defined as "It is the realization that various problems are similar, and that by grouping similar problems, a single solution might be found to a set of problems therefore saving time and effort".

The definition of GT is although quite broad, one usually associates GT to production flow analysis only. GT might be applied in different areas of production system. For component design, this is obvious that many components have a similar shape. These similar components might be grouped into design families & a new design might be created by simply modifying a presents design from the similar family. By using this concept, composite components might be identified.

For manufacturing reasons, GT presents a greater significance than simply a design philosophy. Similar manufacturing processes might be required for those components which are not similar in shape. And those components might be grouped into a cell. The set of similar components might be called as a part family. As all family members needs similar processes, a machine cell might be built to manufacture the family. It makes production planning & control much easier because only similar components are considered for each of cell. Such a cell-oriented layout is called as group-technology layout or cellular layout.

Objectives

After learning this unit, you must be able to understand the system of coding and classification of parts in cellular manufacturing, recognize various types of production flow analysis techniques, and identify the role of scheduling & control in cellular manufacturing.