Cell Manufacturing Introduction

What is Cell Manufacturing?

Cell manufacturing, also known as work cells, flexible manufacturing cells (FMCs) or simply cells, represents an alternative organizational structure that seeks to reduce manufacturing lead times, improve product cost, quality and delivery and create an atmosphere of employee involvement and continuous improvement. The goal of any manufacturing process is really to produce quality goods, efficiently while minimizing costs.

Wikipedia defines the goal of cell manufacturing as "The goal of cellular manufacturing is having the flexibility to produce a high variety of low demand products, while maintaining the high productivity of large scale production. Cell designers achieve this through modularity in both process design and product design."

A few questions that will be brought up for discussion as I investigate the merits of cell manufacturing are:

• If a manufacturing facility implements cells does one size fit all?
• Can all manufacturing benifit from cell manufacturing?
• What about product lines, assembly houses, made to order job shops and short run jobs?
• In the next series of blogs on cell manufacturing I'm going to take a look at how cells manufacturing possibly should and should not be implemented. Does it work for low varity products?
• What if there are high demand products in the production line and how does it affect the cell manufacturing process?

This blog will also focus on how software can best be utilized if cell manufacturing is being used. Some examples are what relevance is tracking, job costing and both small and large assemblies.

Please comment as often as you wish as we investigate cell manufacturing.

Sites for more information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_manufacturing

http://www.mie-solutions.com

MIE Trak 10.2 Released

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRLog (Press Release) – Nov 03, 2008 – MIE Solutions, a proven leader in the software industry, has just released version 10.1 of their industry leading production control software for the manufacturing industry.


MIE Trak 10.2 has just been released which covers over 150 new enhancements and changes to the 10.1 released product. Features include quick purchase order creation from requirements, automatic work order creation from MRP reporting, improved nesting data collection to improve job costing and many of the screens are now resizable to fit larger monitors to improve productivity. Quick order entry has been added to the sales order module to enable quick entry of sales orders. A new exploded bill of material which includes labor summary is a great new tool to see a large assembly and its materials and labor requirements. Many new reports including a work in process and profitability report which explodes assembly work orders into individual components for an accurate view of the costing. Lean manufacturing is ideal with MIE Trak which allows manufacturing cells to be handled, tracked and costs accumulated very efficiently.

MIE Solutions provides an integrated environment to all its products including document management with MIE Docs and integration into MIE Exchange B2B buyer / supplier portal for ease of data entry. Customers can now enter purchase orders online through MIE Exchange and those purchase orders a securely transmitted directly into the MIE Trak production control and tracking system to eliminate data entry errors.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I will be posting information weekly on what has been happening with the company, manufacturing and b2b. There are a lot of exciting areas with software development in the manufacturing arena and here is a place where they can be discussed.

Discussions will include but not limited to :

ERP
Lean Manufacturing
Cell Manufacturing
Quote and Estimating
Scheduling
B2B
Supplier Portals
Document Management
Preventive Maintenance
and others

Take a look at the following websites which I will be discussing in the future.

http://www.mie-solutions.com
http://www.mie-exchange.com
http://forum.mie-web.com