| Companies that build flexibility into their manufacturing system gain a competitive edge by producing a wide variety of products simultaneously. The simultaneous production of a set of products requires paying close attention to the flow of the production process. If the production flow is poorly managed, parts may have long manufacturing lead times and materials may spend a large amount of time in queues as work in process. Such operational conditions may jeopardize the competitive potential of the production system. In this dissertation, we study how to manage the simultaneous production of a set of products to attain high responsiveness, short manufacturing lead times and low inventories in flexible manufacturing and assembly systems. Our approach to this problem involves the use of product and manufacturing system design decisions to influence the operational behavior of the shop.;In our first essay, we develop a general conceptual framework, Design for Product Set Manufacturability (DFPSM), to consider the implications of the simultaneous production of a set of products at the product and manufacturing system design levels. We focus on manufacturability requirements that stem from the implementation of a simple and efficient production scheme that we call synchronized flow manufacturing. We address a host of managerial issues in light of the framework of DFPSM.;In our second essay, we concentrate on the use of manufacturing system design decisions to satisfy the conditions for synchronized flow manufacturing. We study how to assign operations to machines and allocate capacity so as to optimize the performance of the synchronized flow. We develop tools for considering product sets which consist of derivatives, similar families of products, and parts that have total process flexibility.;The emphasis in the last essay is on the implementation of synchronized flow manufacturing through the use of product design decision variables. We propose an AND/OR tree representation of the alternative designs and process plans for manufacturing the products, and we present two approaches that make use of product design flexibility to satisfy the conditions for synchronized flow. The first approach, product design selection, is based on searching and choosing designs from the AND/OR trees. The second approach, late differentiation, combines product design flexibility with partitioning the set of products to attain the synchronized flow. We conclude that the early incorporation of manufacturing process need has a significant potential to improve manufacturing system performance. |
