The Characteristics of Process Design, and Describes How to Influence the Performance Objectives of Production Operations from the Following Six Aspects

This report mainly describes the characteristics of process design, and describes how to influence the performance objectives of production operations from the following six aspects.

At the beginning, there are three main principles of shop floor layout: layout by process, layout by product, and layout by fix position. Firstly, the principle of process specialization is to arrange the arrangement of production units or equipment according to the characteristics of the production process. In this arrangement, similar production units or equipment are put together. For example, the mechanical manufacturing plant separately sets the lathe, grinder and other equipment to form the lathe workshop (or section), the mill workshop (or the section); the hospital is arranged according to the function of providing specific services to form a department of internal medicine, surgery and so on. Secondly, product layout principles are designed for a specific product or service object. The basis of product layout is standardization and division of work. The entire product is broken down into a series of standardized operations, which are completed by specialized manpower and processing equipment. For example, the automobile assembly line has basically no change or little change, and the entire assembly sequence is fixed. Thirdly, fixed-position layout means that the product stays in one place due to its large size or weight, which requires the production equipment to be moved to the product to be processed, rather than the way the product is moved to the equipment. This layout is often used in shipyards, construction sites and film location studios.

In the above three layout principles, a Total Preventive Maintenance (TPM) philosophy must be carried out throughout to ensure a high degree of reliability and predictability from the all the manufacturing resources. In theory, TPM is a maintenance program. It requires all the company's personnel to participate, and also requires the company's employees to independently perform corrective operations. In addition, it also requires a longer operating period, because TPM itself has a development process, it takes about one year or more to implement TPM, and it takes time for the company's employees to change their minds. TPM has made maintenance an indispensable and extremely important part of the business, making maintenance downtime an integral part of the workday schedule. Maintenance is no longer an unproductive job. In some cases, repairs can be considered as part of the overall manufacturing process, rather than simply after a pipeline failure.

Increasingly, many production facilities are introducing a cell manufacturing approach, where all the necessary work centres are arranged, adjacent to each other, in the order of the manufacturing sequence of the product. Historically, this dedicated layout was only used foe high production volumes, but more recently flexible cells are being developed to deal with a group or family of similar parts. Features of manufacturing cell layout include the following five points. Firstly, the materials handing almost disappears. Secondly, the work is low during process. Thirdly, the SFC, scheduling and control are very simple. Fourthly, the throughput is fast. Finally, little supervision as work is highly rationalized and allocated to a semi-specialist team. This layout is not as flexible as the process approach. A failure in one work centre will stop the whole cell; material supply failures are still a problem. Maintenance and support are still marginally more difficult, although much of the simple routine maintenance is usually undertaken by the cell team members.

In addition, the appropriate systems for the scenario suggested are hybrid system and flexible manufacturing system. On the one hand, over the years, hybrid layouts have evolved, the most important of which is group technology, which combines similar components that are purely for manufacturing purposes. In practice, process layout and product placement are often combined, that is, in a production unit, both the object specialization unit and the process specialization unit, and the arrangement is a hybrid arrangement. In fact, this arrangement is the most common, because in many companies, products have a certain volume, but not enough to form a single production line. However, the series of products often have similar processing, and it is possible to make the completely “disordered” facilities in a single piece of production “orderly” to some extent, thus combining the two arrangements. There are many forms of hybrid arrangement. For example, parts production adopts the principle