The organization of manufacturing systems is a basic point that every industrial company must prioritize to maintain a competitive position in a highly demanding business environment. An adequate organization of the production processes contributes towards reducing operational costs and contributes directly to the achievement of the productivity and efficiency goals set by the company.
A manufacturing system must be designed with the proper organization from the beginning, this facilitates later automation as production needs require. Flexibility is one of the basic requirements of contemporary manufacturing systems since it represents the capacity to adapt to the incessant changes in the markets. The current evolution of manufacturing systems has been directed towards the development of integral manufacturing cells with high processing capacity.
One of the main advantages of group technology is the decomposition of a manufacturing system into families of parts with similar design and processing characteristics. Manufacturing in production cells is an application of group technology, having as main objectives the minimization of machine set-up and processing times, thus reducing inventories, manufacturing costs and delivery times to the customer.
Below, you will review some benefits of applying group technology in industrial organizations.8.1 Benefits of group technology in design
When the principles of group technology are applied in an industrial organization, a reduction in part design time is possible. Once the existing parts in the organization have been coded based on their design attributes, a database can be created with the technical characteristics of all the company's products.
When a new part needs to be designed for in-plant production, the design features that the new part has can be reused from those that already exist in the database, avoiding a complete redesign of the new part. This operation constitutes one of the simplest ways to reduce waste in time and effort, contributing to the development of agile manufacturing (Kalpakjian and Schmid, 2020).
Example
There is a requirement to design a shaft for an electric motor. The design does not currently exist within the company, however, there are models of similar parts for other engines, which have been manufactured in the past. The designer, based on the coding criteria, can look for a similar design and take advantage of the features that are common in the new product.
During the analysis stage it is determined that it is necessary to change some parameters such as the length of the new shaft, the diameter of the center or the dimensions of the wedges. However, since the function of the parts and their overall geometry is similar, the designer will only be responsible for making the corresponding parameter changes, accommodating the shape of the new part, and simplifying the steps of a design that would have started from scratch. Now, should the new arrow have a design feature that needs to be fully realized, it will be permanently available for future products that may require it.
Within the database created with the classifications and codifications of the parts manufactured by the organization, not only are the design and processing characteristics of these parts stored, but also the experience of the professionals involved in all stages of their development. This represents a great support for new designers joining the organization, having at their disposal a source of training that might otherwise be inaccessible to them.
In addition to representing a time savings for the design of parts, the data stored in the company's database constitutes the basis of the company's knowledge, thus forming one of its main assets in the long term.
8.2 Benefits of group technology in manufacturing
Group technology offers multiple benefits in the manufacturing of parts in an industrial organization, the very fact of classifying parts into families and their coding is the basis for the implementation of cellular manufacturing. The ultimate goal of cellular manufacturing is to manufacture parts in medium volumes, seeking the economies of high-volume part runs on dedicated lines.
To achieve the aforementioned, cell flexibility is indispensable to manufacture the parts of a family while keeping cell set-up times to a minimum (model changeover times). The cellular structure makes it possible to achieve the above, i.e., they are manufacturing systems with great flexibility to process the parts of a family with minimum set-up times.
In addition to the above, cellular manufacturing allows for the reduction of in-process inventory throughout the organization and contributes to increased labor productivity. The fact that the work in process within the factory is reduced means that production cycle times are shortened, i.e., the product can be delivered to the customer faster than with traditional manufacturing, and material handling around the plant is reduced.
There are a number of additional benefits inherent in cellular manufacturing, which pertain to labor. Since a manufacturing cell requires few workers grouped in a small work team and this work team is in charge of processing the parts from start to finish, the human relations between them become better. Because they are grouped in a relatively small space, everyone is aware of problems occurring anywhere in the process and gets involved in solving them, providing greater job satisfaction.
In a traditional production line, a worker is in charge of only a small fraction of the total work performed on the line, as opposed to his role in a manufacturing 
cell, where he/she must perform several jobs in the cell, since the cell is made up of a few people, each of whom is in charge of several jobs or processes.
On the other hand, in an organization where production is organized by processes, a single worker is involved in the manufacture of numerous parts, all completely dissimilar to each other, meanwhile, in a manufacturing cell, workers will be producing a limited number of types of parts and all related to each other, since the cells are designed to manufacture families of parts, this makes their training cycle shorter and their ability to perform the work with higher quality is increased.
An example of the application of group technology is a company that has arranged its process manufacturing system when it has a production catalog with a wide variety of parts and a medium production volume in each of them.
When implementing group technology in its production system, the company starts by analyzing all the parts it produces using an appropriate classification and coding system.
Once it has generated the different families of parts, it proceeds to restructure its machinery into production cells to assign them to the manufacture of the families. By switching to group technology, the company decreases manufacturing and customer delivery time, increases labor efficiency, and improves the job satisfaction level of its employees.
8.3 Benefits of group technology in management
Another advantage of using group technology in an industrial organization arises from the classification and coding of parts, since this operation forms the basis for the implementation of computer-aided process planning. Once the coding is complete, the system communicates with the CAPP platform, which interprets the codes assigned to each part and uses them to plan the route it must follow through the different processes required for its manufacture (Groover, 2018).
The integration of classification and coding systems with CAPP systems is complemented by the incorporation of PP&C production planning and control systems, giving greater efficiency to the manufacturing system by achieving optimal utilization of existing equipment within the organization. Today, a complex manufacturing system is unable to reach its maximum capacity without integrating all these tools into a single platform.
Production scheduling is facilitated by the implementation of group technology, since it is easier to schedule manufacturing cells from parts classified into families. This is less complicated than scheduling the production of parts in a factory that has its machinery distributed by processes, where the universe of machines through which the part can pass is much larger than when the machines have already been organized by cells or assigned to a virtual cell.
Manufacturing management benefits from the implementation of group technology, by significantly reducing work-in-process (WIP) inventories and raw material warehouse inventory. When WIP inventories accumulate between processes, they result in a large amount of waste caused by errors that are not identified in time. When errors are discovered by the continuation of the WIP flow throughout your process, it may be too late to repair and rework the defective products, which usually results in delays in delivery times to customers and becomes a serious production management problem.
As group technology is geared towards small batch and unit production, WIP inventories are tremendously reduced and with them, defect detection is much timelier, waste levels are lowered, and customer deliveries are improved. Likewise, the optimization of production scheduling facilitates the management of the production floor, in-process, and raw material inventory.
The adoption of group technology in manufacturing systems is born from the need of different industries to satisfy an ever-changing market demand, in an efficient and economical way for the company and with a satisfactory speed of response for the customer.
The basic premise of group technology is that similar parts are manufactured similarly and is based on the identification of part families.
The starting point is the classification and codification of the parts, this methodology holds that once this process is completed, the design and manufacturing characteristics will be stored in a database, from which any of its characteristics can be retrieved. This information can be used both in the design process of a new part, which shortens the design cycle, and in planning the routing of the part through the plant or even making the production schedule in the cells of the manufacturing system.
The use of cellular manufacturing has also positively affected in-process parts inventories throughout the plant and, therefore, the organization's speed of response to a customer's requirements. From the personnel point of view, there has been a better integration of the workers to their manufacturing system, less training time, greater specialization in the parts of the family, better quality of the parts produced and, on many occasions, improvements in the productivity of the labor force.
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The student will develop a proposal to increase the efficiency of a traditional production process by applying the concepts related to group technology and its benefits.
To identify the benefits of using group technology in modern manufacturing processes.
Read chapter 18 of the textbook: Group Technology and Cellular Manufacturing.
Individually
A metal-mechanical company is transforming its production processes with the introduction of group technology. Among the diversification proposals that have been put forward is the manufacture of a new line of parts (like the one shown in figure 1).
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Figure 1. Characteristics of the new part to be manufactured
The company's catalog contains a coded part with similar characteristics: manufacturing material, dimensions, and tolerance (figure 2).
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Figure 2. Characteristics of the part currently in the manufacturing catalog
Although company executives are interested in making the shift to group technology, they are not yet clear about the benefits this transformation can bring to their business.
Deliverable (s)
Document with the development of the activity.
Evaluation criteria
Description
Apply knowledge of group technology to redesign a part by reusing its components.
Instructions
Individually
