Operations and Supply Chain Management The Core

176 OPERATIONS AND SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
A WORKCENTER.
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A MANUFACTURING CELL.
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is referred to as a department and is focused on a particular type of operation. Examples
include a workcenter for drilling holes, one for performing grinding operations, and a
painting area. The workcenters in a low-volume toy factory might consist of shipping and
receiving, plastic molding and stamping, metal forming, sewing, and painting. Parts for the
toys are fabricated in these workcenters and then sent to the assembly workcenter, where
they are put together. In many installations, optimal placement often means placing workcenters
with large amounts of interdepartmental traffic adjacent to each other.
Manufacturing Cells A manufacturing cell is formed by allocating dissimilar machines
to cells that are designed to work on products that have similar shapes and processing
requirements. Manufacturing cells are widely used in metal fabricating, computer chip
manufacture, and assembly work.
The process used to develop a manufacturing cell is depicted in Exhibit 6.4. It can be
broken down into three distinct steps:
1. Group parts into families that follow a common sequence of steps. This requires
classifying parts by using some type of coding system. In practice, this can often
be quite complex and can require a computerized system. For the purpose of the
example shown in Exhibit 6.4A, four “part families” have already been defined and
are identified by unique arrow designs. This part of the exhibit shows the routing of
parts when a conventional workcenter-based layout is used. Here, parts are routed
through the individual workcenters to be produced.
2. Next, dominant flow patterns are identified for each part family. This will be used as
the basis for reallocating equipment to the manufacturing cells (see Exhibit 6.4B).
3. Finally, machines and the associated processes are physically regrouped into cells
(see Exhibit 6.4C). Often, there will be parts that cannot be associated with a
family and specialized machinery that cannot be placed in any single cell because
of its general use. These unattached parts and machinery are placed in a “remainder
cell.”