Integrated Approach for Cellular Manufacturing - a Case Study

To cope with fast changing customer requirements, industrial demands and to meet stringent specifications of customers Cellular Manufacturing Systems has become an effective tool in hands of manufacturers. Most of the published literature on cell formation earlier considers only the data available in the route sheets and ignored subproblems associated with cell formation. There is a need to develop an integrated approach for Cellular Manufacturing, which considers all the aspects. Present paper focuses on developing an integrated approach for Cellular Manufacturing. Proposed method considers workload, volume of production and processing times for machine cell and part family formation, which was ignored by past researchers. Proposed method has been tested on one of the largest public sectors in Asia and the benefits that can be obtained by implementation are reported.