2003 Volume 54 Issue 3 Pages 176-183
This paper discusses the problem of a designing a production seat system with high flexibility for a combination of make-to-stock (MTS) and make-to-order (MTO) products in a film manufacturing factory. Like an airline or train booking system, customers' orders are assigned a production seat. Using the production seat system, inquiries about the delivery for individual orders can be answered quickly. This study adopts three types of flexibility coping with deviation in quantity, time, and ratio of MTO and MTS products based on a survey conducted at an actual film manufacturing factory. That is, routing flexibility, flexibility of flexible seat, and volume flexibility are adopted. First, routing flexibility enables alternative processing between manufacturing processes. Second, a flexible seat is a production seat which can interchange MTO and MTS products. Third, volume flexibility is the ability to change the total amount of output. This paper proposes how to design an effective production seat system with plural flexibility for practical application. The unfilled rate with respect to market demand for MTS products and the ratio of delivery date achievement for MTO products are used as measures of manufacturing performance.
