Flexibility and manufacturing system design: An experimental investigation

Manufacturing industries today are faced with steady and unrelenting changes to the environment in which they operate. In order to survive and profit, manufacturing facilities must be designed such that they exhibit desirable system-level flexibility characteristics. The relationships between flexibility and manufacturing system design, however, remain largely unexplored. This paper investigates the effects of manufacturing system design on product, mix, production, and volume flexibilities, and on trade-offs between these flexibility types, for different product environments. Of particular concern is the determination of whether or not flexibility trade-offs can be avoided, and if so, how. Simulation experiments are performed to determine flexibility values for 16 different manufacturing system design 'approaches' and two levels of part processing flexibility. A total of 800 different manufacturing system/product set combinations are investigated. The results indicate that the effects of manufacturing system design on flexibility are not always intuitive, and that they can change depending upon the level of part processing flexibility present. In addition, however, they show that flexibility trade-offs are not inevitable: multiple flexibility types can be increased in value simultaneously through proper selection of the design approach.