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?
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
