An Investigation of Impact of the Product Family Design on the Shop Floor Performance

Abstract

While many approaches have been proposed to optimize the product family design for measures of cost, revenue and performance, many of these approaches fail to incorporate the complexity of the manufacturing issues into family design decision-making. One of these issues is different approaches for assembly sequencing. This paper presents a computer simulation study by which the impact of two postponement strategies is investigated for a real-life product family case under various demand conditions. Overall, the results indicate that when the product family design takes into account the assembly sequencing decisions, the outcomes at the shop floor level improve. The results have implications for companies that are looking into increasing their revenue without increasing their investment in the shop floor.