Exploratory Study of Manufacturing Flexibility for understanding of manufacturing complexity in Automotive Industry

Abstract

As technology evolves over time, the manufacturing systems in various production industries are getting more complicated in accordance with plant productivity, product quality, new development processes, and complex supply chain management. To deal with these problems, previous research has proposed a few mathematical approaches to analyzing system natures as named manufacturing complexity. However, the originality of complex environments arises from the accumulated interactions between multiple systems’ components. It means the basic process of analyzing manufacturing complexity starts from investigating the interactions of system variables of manufacturing operations. While the manufacturing complexity poses a critical aspect of operational flows and processes, manufacturing flexibility allows the system to react quickly and easily in case of changes to designs and processes. Although analyzing complexity and flexibility is costly and time-consuming, extra advantages should be expected by understanding inherent system complexity and flexibility because it is possible to find the system’s operational problems and optimize the performance. As a case study of the manufacturing complexity in this research, the flexibility of a workforce’s productivity is proposed by investigating real data over three years (2005~2007) from the Harbour Report of automotive plants. Moreover, a new approach to understanding manufacturing complexity is proposed by defining essential and identical features of complexity and flexibility.