Manufacturing Resource Modelling for Productivity Management

Abstract: The role of manufacturing has been vital for the creation of welfare in advanced economies ever since the industrial revolution. During the last decades several new markets have emerged and actors in manufacturing are competing on, what is now so often referred to as, globalised markets. There exists no single solution for manufactures to achieve economic efficiency. It is, however, evident that no manufacturing company can stay competitive without a sustainable and efficient use of available resources. The aim of this Licentiate thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of the productivity improvement potential at shop floors. Previous research has shown that manufacturing companies, in general, can improve the utilization of existing manufacturing resources by 30 to 50 per cent. To harvest this potential, owners must invest in their organisations. Therefore, the improvement potential needs to be visualised and quantified in order to motivate decision makers to prioritize shop floor improvement initiatives. A model and a modelling approach are proposed that provide insight into the link between the utilization of manufacturing resources and the real capacity of manufacturing processes. Quantification and visualisation of the improvement potential is accomplished by combining, and further developing, established industrial engineering techniques together with the international standard for manufacturing data management, incorporated in the model and the modelling approach. The model is not designed to give a complete description of a production system but to provide a bottom-up approach to analyse the improvement potential of selected processes and subsystems. Future work includes a software implementation of the model, towards the development of a decision support tool.