Flexibility
Flexibility is an attribute that permits a mixed model manufacturing system to cope up with a certain level of variations in part or product style, without having any interruption in production because of changeovers between models. Flexibility measures the capability to adapt "to a wide range of possible environment". To be flexible, a manufacturing system must possess the following capabilities:
- Recognised of the different production units to carry out the correct operation
- Quick changeover of operating instructions to the computer controlled production machines
- Quick changeover of physical setups of fixtures, tools & other working units
These capabilities are frequently difficult to engineer through manually operated manufacturing systems. So, an automated system assisted along sensor system is needed to accomplish the needs & requirements of contemporary business milieu. Flexible manufacturing system has come up like a viable mean to attain these prerequisites. The term flexible manufacturing system, or FMS, refers to a extremely automated GT machine cell, containing a group of computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools and supporting workstations, interconnected though an automated material handling and storage system, and all of controlled by a distributed computer system.
The cause, the FMS is called as flexible, is that this is capable of processing a variety of different part styles simultaneously with the rapid tooling and instruction changeovers. Also, quantities of productions might be adjusted easily to changing demand patterns.