The influence of variability on the performance of a manufacturing cell

Variability in processing time leads to uncertainty in many aspects of production and operations management, including production scheduling, order fulfillment, on-time delivery and others. Variability is a major factor in inefficiency and waste. Manufacturing cells incorporate mechanisms for eliminating or reducing the effects of variability, but the joint influence of these mechanisms on the overall performance of the cell are difficult to evaluate in terms of the various measures of performance used in practice and research.; The influence of human operators within a manufacturing cell is acknowledged generally as important to operations management, but the role of the operator is not well understood in terms of the influence of variability in processing time. The role of the operator is rarely incorporated into the models of manufacturing cells used to design, test and experiment with mechanisms developed to deal with processing time variability.; This exploratory study focuses on capturing the basic effects of operator behavior on the performance of a manufacturing cell when the operator has information on the state of the system, and when the operator does not have that information. These effects are evaluated within the context of other system controls normally put in place in manufacturing cells to cope with the influence of processing time variability. The joint effects are evaluated in terms of several important dimensions of cell performance.