Select/Assign Equipment

In this stage, choose the equipment from the master list of the machines through the plant. If there is any conflict or non-availability of the promised equipment, it might become essential to go through a revision process to see how it may be accommodated. Some techniques that could be tried are following:

• Remove the contested operation through material or process change.

• Bring two or more cells closer, so that they might easily share the equipment.

• Recombine the product mix so that all of the parts that need the contested resource could flow through the same cell.

• Redesign the process so that the contested operation is completed in the beginning so that it shall not drastically affect the scheduling of the cell.

• Redesign the parts to take benefit of the common characteristics of the equipment in the cell.