Fundamentals of Manufacturing System Design and Analysis

Participants will learn how to analyze and evaluate discrete manufacturing systems in different types of production environments.  The course will emphasize production flow, manufacturing cell design, inventory buffers, and performance metrics.  Course will also cover continuous improvement techniques and strategy deployment.

Course Goals

After completing this course, participants will be able to:

1. Compare and contrast different types of discrete manufacturing systems
2. Describe terminology related to discrete manufacturing systems
3. Calculate and interpret common performance metrics for operations (e.g. cycle time, flow time, utilization, WIP)
4. Apply Little’s Law to determine flow time given WIP and WIP given flow time
5. Evaluate different ways of assigning operators to cells or production lines (e.g. dedicated, rabbit chase, bucket brigade, flexible)
6. Explain continuous improvement philosophies and how they relate to manufacturing system fundamentals (brief introduction to Lean, Theory of Constraints, Agile Manufacturing, and Quick Response Manufacturing).
7. Leverage strategy deployment for effective implementation