Flexible Manufacturing Systems
Globalization, flicking market needs and modern lifestyle trends has put up great challenge to manufacturing industries. In today business scenario, the competitiveness of any manufacturing industry is finds out by its ability to respond rapidly to the rapidly changing market and to generate high quality products at low costs. Though, the product cost is no longer the predominant factor affecting the manufacturers' perception. Other competitive factors such like flexibility, efficient delivery, and quality and customer satisfaction are drawing the identical attention. Manufacturing industries are striving to achieve these capabilities through automation, robotics and other innovative concepts such like production planning and control (PPC), just-in-time (JIT), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and so on.
Flexible manufacturing is a concept that permits manufacturing systems to be built under high customized production needs. The issues such like reduction of inventories & market-response time to meet customer demands, flexibility to adapt to modify in the market, dropping the cost of products and services to grab more market shares etc have made it almost obligatory to various firms to switch over to flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) like a viable means to accomplish the above needs while producing consistently good quality and cost effective products. FMS is in fact an automated set of numerically controlled machine tools & material handling systems, capable of performing a broad range of manufacturing operations with rapid tooling and instruction changeovers.
Objectives
After learning this unit, you should be able to
- Described flexible manufacturing systems and its role in CIM environment,
- Understand the techniques of machine loading, scheduling & their practical application in CIM environment, and
- Identify the uses of FMS control system.