The Product Family Design Decisions Impact on Shop Floor Performance: Product Family Size, Postponem

Manufacturers throughout the world search forimprovements to increase profitability.This searchis more challenging when demand uncertainty andfluctuations are considered.For betterprofitability, many researchers and practitionersattempts to search shop floor improvements.However,within the last two decades, it has been determinedthat designing product families also providesopportunities for improvements.Overall, while manyapproaches have been proposed to optimize productfamily design for measures of cost and performance,these approaches fail to incorporate manufacturingissues into family design decisions.Postponement isone of the most important of those issues.Thisresearch presents a computer simulation study bywhich the impact of assembly scheduling on theproduct family design outcomes is investigated.Itextends the studies wherein cost and customerwaiting times were estimated throughstochastic.Simulation is selected for itssensitivity to demand randomness and processvariations.This work has implications formanufacturers seeking to increase their revenuewithout extensively increasing their investment inthe shop floor.