Iterative Methodology to Improve the Resources Utilization Rate of a Production System

The production resource management is an important activity to acquire competitive advantage, which is concerned about how to integrate equipment with the aim of meeting the demand and reaching lower price of final products. This paper presents a typical issue, which is the fact that extra capacities of bottleneck equipment result in oversizing and thus idleness of it. Moreover, it will form a new bottleneck point in other equipment. A discrete event simulation model in Arena 5.0 is built and executed to supervise the bottleneck formation, monitoring it through the information of utilization rate. Following, an iterative methodology is presented to improve the utilization rate of all equipment, obtained from a mathematical modeling of the elements which pass through the production system. This methodology can be easily implemented in the programming software Pascal 7.0.