Evaluation of the performance domain of cellular and functional layouts

This paper examines the effect of system configuration, underlying system structure, demand variation, and operation time variability on overall system performance. Three specific system configurations were investigated: a cellular manufacturing system, a dedicated job shop, and a pure job shop. System performance was compared based on five traditional measures and three managerial measures. The traditional measures were average flow time, average job lateness, average work-in-process levels, average distance moved per order, and average machine utilization. The managerial measures were average numer of departmental interactions per order, average number of open orders in each department, and mean time to reappearance of parts in the same family at machines. The results indicate that the demand pattern variability and processing time variability exert the greatest impact on the measures of system performance. In general, the cellular systems performed the best under conditions of low processing time variability. In addition, machine dedication in a batch production environment seriously degraded system performance.