Product Family Design Decisions Impact on Shop Floor Performance

Manufacturers throughout the world search for§improvements to increase profitability.This search §is more challenging when demand uncertainty and§fluctuations are considered.For better§profitability, many researchers and practitioners§attempts to search shop floor improvements.However, §within the last two decades, it has been determined§that designing product families also provides§opportunities for improvements.Overall, while many §approaches have been proposed to optimize product §family design for measures of cost and performance, §these approaches fail to incorporate manufacturing §issues into family design decisions.Postponement is §one of the most important of those issues.This§research presents a computer simulation study by§which the impact of assembly scheduling on the§product family design outcomes is investigated.It§extends the studies wherein cost and customer§waiting times were estimated through§stochastic.Simulation is selected for its§sensitivity to demand randomness and process§variations.This work has implications for§manufacturers seeking to increase their revenue§without extensively increasing their investment in§the shop floor.