Develop Process Flow within the Cell

Next step must be the development of process flow diagrams for all of components to be manufactured in the cell. Distinctive process flow diagram is illustrated in Figure 8. This provides the information associated to the actual flow of generate through the equipment in the cell. This will help in calculating the total workload in the cell. When developing the process flow it is significant to let any of the possible variations that might occur in the volumes or capacity.

Variations normally occur in three areas:

• Variation in capacity because of vacations and holidays
• Product life cycles & introduction of new products
• Seasonality in the market

Any of these variations might easily affect the capacity planning done depend on the annual averages. Therefore these will have to be taken into account throughout the capacity planning.

The current flow diagrams must capture all the steps involved in the current flow pattern. That might include the details such like movement to buffers and wash areas. This is significant at this stage to note down any of the non-value added operations involved. With this information it shall be possible to examine the possibility of the decrease in the non-value added operations. The designers must critically verify the current process flows to see any possibility of dropping the costs and operations. The possibilities are following :

• Reducing or removal non-value added operations
• Eliminating the operations
• Combining the operations
• Streamlining by standardizing the operations or materials
• Dropping the operations that are done on a very small number of parts in the cell

Any possible improvements to the process flow by altering the sequence or alterning some other operation might be examined in this stage. Some examples are following :

• Cleaning and deburring operations can frequently be eliminated by altering the machining techniques
• Simplification of raw material can frequently be attained by adding unique characteristics at the starting of assembly line.
• Careful selection of cutting fluids might result in the elimination of washing along the cutting fluid doing the flushing operation.