This chapter focuses on providing a methodology for lean thinking based investment planning from the perspective of cellular or hybrid manufacturing systems. The chapter has been divided into three parts. First part provides a general explanation of why lean thinking is so beneficial for managing manufacturing processes and obtaining sustained improvement. This part then moves to the aim of cel...

In this research paper cellular manufacturing is discussed under conditions of changing product demand. Traditional cell formation procedures ignore any changes in demand over time from product redesign and other factors. However given that in today‟s business environment, product life cycles are short, a framework is proposed that creates a multi-period cellular layout plan including cell rede...

the cellular automata method has been used to simulate the pattern formation of the schlögl model as a bistable reaction-diffusion system. both microscopic and macroscopic cellular automata approaches have been considered and two different methods for obtaining the probabilities in the microscopic approach have been mentioned. the results show the tendency of the system towards the more stable ...

This paper presents the idea of creating cells while reducing part-level sequence-dependent setup time in general cellular manufacturing systems (CMS). Setup time reduction in CMS has gained modest attention in the literature. This could be attributed to the fact that the fundamental problem in cell formation in CMS has been mainly related to material handling and machine utilization while setu...

The converting process from traditional production systems (e.g., Job Shops) to focused (cellular) systems is important as one requirement of global manufacturing to challenge the existing global financial crisis. This represents a big problem and a huge task for manufacturers and academicians which almost most of industrial enterprises around the world are still working as a job shop. This con...

The product oriented organization of manufacturing systems based on group technology cells, typical of lean production, is a very effective organization to timely meet customer requirements and take full advantage of production resources. Frequently it has been pointed out that studies on cellular manufacturing systems tend to be theoretical and addressing only a few of the relevant practical i...

Concurrent engineering (CE) has emerged as an essential design principle that facilitates rapid and efficient product development that is necessary to survive in today’s fiercely competitive environment. However, the lack of tools that address design team formulation and proper design task assignment in CE has made its application an immense challenge. In this article we explicitly address this...

This paper uses panel cointegration and error correction models to unveil the direction of long-run causality between the real product wage and labor productivity at the industry level. I use two datasets of manufacturing industries: the EU-Klems dataset covering 11 industries in 19 developed economies, and the Unido Industrial Statistics Database covering 22 industries in 30 developed and deve...

The objective of this research is to develop a turbine blade investment casting cost advisor model to assist a blade designer in decision-making in a concurrent engineering environment. It is a microcomputer based cost estimating system that employs a manufacturing knowledge base. The concept of the manufacturing process for blade production by the investment casting method is used to develop t...