Chap 7
MANUFACTURING PROCESSES
Production processes are used to make any manufactured item
Step 2: Make the product
Step 3: Deliver the product
Step 1: Source the parts needed
Production Process Terms
Customer order decoupling point – where inventory is positioned to allow entities in the supply chain to operate independently
Lean manufacturing – a means of achieving high levels of customer service with minimal inventory investment
Lead time – the time needed to respond to a customer order
Types of Firms
Assemble-to-Order
Make-to-Order/ Engineer-to-Order
Make-to-Stock
Ex of products: televisions, clothing, packaged food products
Satisfying customers: Essential to balance the level of inventory against the level of customer service
Serve customers from finished goods inventory
Use lean manufacturing to achieve higher service levels for a given inventory investment
Easy with unlimited inventory, but inventory costs money
Trade-off between the costs of inventory and level of customer service must be made
Primary task: define a customer’s order in terms of alternative components because these are carried in inventory
Ex: Dell Computer makes their desktop computers
A required design enables as much flexibility as possible in combining components
Combine a number of preassembled modules to meet a customer’s specifications
Advantage: moving the customer order decoupling point from finished goods to components.
Engineer-to-Order: Work with the customer to design and then make the product
Make-to-Order: Make the customer’s product from raw materials, parts, and components
Ex: Boeing’s process for making commercial aircraft
Customer order decoupling point could be in either raw materials at the manufacturing site or the supplier inventory
Depending on how similar the products are, it might not even be possible to preorder parts
Organizing Production Processes
Workcenter (job shop)
Assembly line: work processes are arranged according to the progressive steps by which the product is made
Project Layout
Manufacturing cell
Continuous process: assembly line only the flow is continuous such as with liquids
A high degree of task ordering is common
May be developed by arranging materials according to their assembly priority
The product remains in a fixed location.
Manufacturing equipment is moved to the product.
Optimal: placing workcenters with large interdepartmental traffic adjacent to each other
Similar equipment or functions are grouped together
Arrange workcenters in a way that optimizes the movement of material
A dedicated area where products that are similar in processing requirements are produced
Formed by allocating dissimilar machines to cells that are designed to work on similar products
Sometimes is referred to as a department and is focused on a particular type of operation
Break-Even Analysis
Model seeks to determine the point in units produced where a company will start making profit on the process, total revenue and total cost are equal
Standard approach to choosing among alternative processes or equipment
Manufacturing Process Flow Design
Focus on the identification of activities that can be minimized or eliminated
✅ Movement and storage
✅ The fewer the moves, delays, and storage, the better the flow
Evaluate the specific processes that material follow as they move through the plant
The Charts
Assembly drawing: an exploded view of the product showing its component parts
Process flowchart: denotes what happens to the product as it progresses through the production facility
Operation and route sheet: specifies operations and process routing
Assembly chart: defines how parts go together, their order of assembly, and overall flow pattern