Measure of manufacturing performance in advanced manufacturing systems

Because of the financial risks as a result of the high investments, decisions concerning investing in advanced manufacturing systems are difficult. The difficulty to decide is gained by the lack of a well-defined measure to support decisions and alarming messages from the industry concerning inverse phenomena upon efforts to improve the productivity. Although economical measures are used to evaluate production systems, it is argued that these measures result in wrong conclusions. Being an economic measure, the productivity is not an adequate measure to determine the manufacturing performance. As is described, the competitive performance should be the measure to support management decisions. Such a measure depends upon a lot of specialized performance measures, like economic performance, technical performance, etc. In practice, the technical measures described in the literature are inadequate to determine the technical performance. Therefore, a measure for the technical performance is introduced which is clear, timely and relevant for the shop floor and the operating departments, and which can be used to compare design alternatives of production systems and to control the production process. The economic measure (productivity) and the technical measure (transformation factor) have been used to design a new bottling line in practice. The development of the designs shows that not one measure should be considered but a combination of measures, resulting in the competitive performance.