Basic Factory Dynamics
Prof. Lanka Krishnanand,
Professor, MED,
National Institute of Technology,
Warangal – 506004
Telangana.
Definitions and Parameters
► Workstation: workstation is a collection of one or more machines or manual
stations that perform (essentially) identical functions. Examples include a
turning station made up of several vertical lathes, an inspection station made
up of several benches staffed by quality inspectors, and a burn-in station
consisting of a single room where components are heated for testing
purposes.
► A part is a piece of raw material, a component, a subassembly, or an
assembly that is worked on at the workstations in a plant.
► A routing describes the sequence of workstations passed through by a part.
Routings begin at a raw material, component, or subassembly stock point and
end at either an intermediate stock point or finished-goods inventory. For
instance, a routing for gears may start at a stock point of raw bar stock; pass
through cutting, hobbing, and deburring; and end at a stock point of finished
gears.
Definitions
The average output of a production process (machine, workstation, line, plant) per unit
time (e.g., parts per hour) is defined as the system’s throughput (TH), or sometimes
throughput rate. At the firm level, throughput is defined as the production per unit
time that is sold. However, managers of production lines generally control what is
made rather than what is sold. Therefore, for a plant, line, or workstation, we define
throughput to be the average quantity of good (nondefective) parts (the manager does
have control over quality) produced per unit time.
An upper limit on the throughput of a production process is its capacity. In most cases,
releasing work into the system at or above the capacity causes the system to become
unstable (i.e., build up WIP without bound).
The inventory between the start and end points of a product routing is called work in
process (WIP). Since routings begin and end at stock points, WIP is all the product
between, but not including, the ending stock points.
The cycle time (CT), which is also called variously average cycle time, flow time,
throughput time, and sojourn time, of a given routing is the average time from release
of a job at the beginning of the routing until it reaches an inventory point at the end of
the routing (i.e., the time the part spends as WIP).
Parameters
► The bottleneck rate (rb) of the line,rb, is the rate (parts per unit time or jobs per
unit time) of the workstation having the highest long-term utilization. By long term
we mean that outages due to machine failures, operator breaks, quality problems,
and so forth, are averaged out over the time horizon under consideration.
► The raw process time (To ) of the line is the sum of the long-term average process
times of each workstation in the line. Alternatively, we can define raw process time
as the average time it takes a single job to traverse the empty line (i.e., so it does
not have to wait behind other jobs).
► The critical WIP (Wo ) of the line is the WIP level for which a line with given values
of rb and To but having no variability achieves maximum throughput (rb, that is) with
minimum cycle time (To). We show below that critical WIP is defined by the
bottleneck rate and raw process time by the following relationship:
Wo = rb To
Penny Fab One Example
Penny Fab One with one WIP
Penny Fab One with Two WIP
Penny Fab One with three WIP
Penny Fab One with Four WIP
Penny Fab One - Table
Penny Fab One Graphs
Penny Fab Two Example
Penny Fab Two Table
Little’s Law: WIP = TH × CT
Uses
1. Queue length calculations.
2. Cycle time reduction.
3. Measure of cycle time.
4. Planned inventory.
5. Inventory turns.
6. Multiproduct systems.
Best Case Performance
Worst Case Performance
Worst Case Performance
Possible states
Special conditions for PWC
States in best-case
States in Worst-case
PWC Average time and CT
Practical Worst Case
Cycle Time Vs WIP
Throughput Vs WIP
HAL Case Study
HAL Performance
Problem