Production flow analysis and cellular manufacturing application

This study aims to determine the reasons of time loss on production flow process of a factory in which replacement parts are manufactured. It offers a new layout which is suitable for cellular manufacturing principles instead of the current traditional layout in order to minimize the time losses. Firstly, the data related to each product, including codes, duration of manufacturing, order of processes and machinery was recorded on a spreadsheet. Afterwards, cellular manufacturing principles were applied to the current layout by using obtained data with the Rank Order Clustering (ROC) technique. As the part –machine relationship matrix typically has a large dimension; new software was developed in order to use ROC method on MATLAB. By means of this software, ROC technique could be applied to the part-machine matrix covering 45 machines and 876 parts. As a result, this study puts forward the improvements which could be made in terms of duration of transportation, set-up time and cycle time by replacing the cellular manufacturing layout with the traditional layout.