| In recent years a large variation of production volume for the mass-production products happens frequently due to the changes in technology and market. Those changes cause introduction of new products having shorter life cycles, thus enforcing modification and renewal of production facilities much earlier than their lifetime. A model was built to assess the impact of manufacturing parameters on the effectiveness of the layout and the material handling system. A relationship was developed between variations in production oriented parameters and its impact on the facility size and final cost of the product being manufactured exclusively in terms of machine time, operator time and material handling duration. A job shop manufacturing scenario was considered for this analysis and a "Powerarm" [22] was considered as the product being manufactured. The various manufacturing parameters involved are considered one at a time and varied keeping the other parameters constant and their impact on the facility layout effectiveness is determined. |
