Part family and manufacturing cell formation in group technology: An example study

In the essence of group technology philosphy, aim of maximizing the productivity takes part nearly in every phase of production process by gathering the similarities of operations that are repeated. Cellular manufacturing, which is described as an application of GT in manufacturing is, gouping parts as part families according to similar manufacturing features and grouping machines as machine groups which operate these part families. The primary contribution of cellular manufacturing is, decomposing the manufacturing systems which are large, complex and difficult to control to subsystems that are smaller and easier to control. The research problem of this study considers what sort of benefits and responsibilities the firms which want to introduce their existing manufacturing systems to group technology and cellular manufacturing, will get from the change. In this respect the objectives of this study can be arranged as: a) What are the flexibility and productivity problems and their reasons that exist in the manufacturing systems and which methods and approaches were developed to solve these problems? What sort of contributions do these methods and approaches provide fort he solution of the problem? b) What kind of changes will forming manufacturing cells, that is the first and the most important phase of transition to cellular manufacturing, produce on existing layout of the factory? And what are the contributions of these changes to the firm from the point of view of productivity and flexibility? In order to answers these questions, in additon to a literature research a gear pump factory that used a traditional manufacturing system was chosen as an example study from the literature and layout of the factory was rearranged according to cellular manufacturing. As a clustering method, Rank Order Clustering method was used to form manufacturing cells which were located in the new layout of example study; and algorithm of the method was applied on existing machines and parts that were operated in the factory with support of Excel package program. Within this framework, findings have been gotten at the end of the study show that, manufacturing cells which were formed according to operation requirements of the parts will be able to overcome negativenesses of the workshop type manufacturing system like complex work-flow, high level work-in-process inventory, long throughout time, low machine utilization, production rate and quality, high production costs etc. and will be able to found conditions that provide flexibility and productivity to the factory. In this respect, it can be said that the study has been done will be able to constitute as an example for the firms which determine competition strategies based on time and cost.