Analytic model to predict productivity in divisional Seru production environment

Advanced production environments emerged as the good solution to address the modern market challenges asking for a wide product mix and low time to market. Within cellular systems, made of independent, modular and flexible working areas, tailored on families of similar products, Serus are of increasing adoption for both manufacturing and assembly tasks. Among them, the so-called divisional Serus are the first step to move from the traditional production lines to a production environment made of a set of identical working areas, parallelising activities and enabling potential productivity increase. Despite their adoption in industry, starting from the electronic sector and moving forward, reference analytic models to predict divisional Seru productivity are rare in the literature, while their formulation and application is a gap to fill. This paper addresses this gap in theory, supporting the transition toward Seru production environment by proposing and proofing the analytic closed-form expressions getting the expected productivity of a divisional Seru made of a generic number of workers and a) one (base case), b) two (extension) and c) a generic number (general case) of product types to produce. Together with the steps to get the productivity expressions for these three cases of immediate practical applicability and not yet proposed by the literature, a case study and sensitivity analysis on the divisional Seru dimension showcase the proposed model industrial use and impact on the expected productivity. Key results highlight a stationary behaviour of the working time for all workers making the Seru productivity dependent on the sum of the workers speed and the product type workloads

"The Shift from Belt Conveyor Line to Work-cell Based Assembly Systems to Cope with Increasing Demand Variation and Fluctuation in The Japanese Electronics Industries"

As consumption patterns become increasingly sophisticated and manufacturers strive to improve their competitiveness, not only offering higher quality at competitive costs, but also by providing broader mix of products, and keeping it attractive by launching successively new products, the turbulence in the markets has intensified. This has impelled leading manufacturers to search the development of alternative production systems supposed to enable them operate more responsively. This paper discusses the trend of abandoning the strategy of relying on factory automation technologies and conveyor-based assembly lines, and shifting towards more human-centered production systems based on autonomous work-cells, observed in some industries in Japan (e.g. consumer electronics, computers, printers) since mid-1990s. The purpose of this study is to investigate this trend which is seemingly uneconomic to manufacturers established in a country where labor costs are among the highest in the world, so as to contribute in the elucidation of its background and rationality. This work starts with a theoretical review linking the need to cope with nowadays' market turbulence with the issue of nurturing more agile organizations. Then, a general view of the diffusion trend of work-cell based assembly systems in Japanese electronics industries is presented, and some empirical facts gathered in field studies conducted in Japan are discussed. It is worthy mentioning that the abandonment of short cycle-time tasks performed along conveyor lines and the organization of workforce around work-cells do not imply a rejection of the lean production paradigm and its distinctive process improvement approach. High man-hour productivity is realized as a key goal to justify the implementation of work-cells usually devised to run in longer cycle-time, and the moves towards this direction has been strikingly influenced by the kaizen philosophy and techniques that underline typical initiatives of lean production system implementation. Finally, it speculates that even though the subject trend is finding wide diffusion in the considered industries, it should not be regarded as a panacea. In industries such as manufacturing of autoparts, despite the notable product diversification observed in the automobile market, its circumstances have still allowed the firms to rely on capital-intensive process, and this has sustained the development of advanced manufacturing technologies that enable the agile implementation and re-configuration of highly automated assembly lines.

The euro at ten - lessons and challenges, 5th ECB Central Banking Conference, 13-14 November 2008

This volume contains a collection of papers, commentaries and speeches concerning the first decade of the euro and the recent global financial crisis.financial integration, optimal currency area

Operational Research: Methods and Applications

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order

Knowledge spillovers from clean and emerging technologies in the UK

The UK government has committed to increase R&D support for clean technologies in an effort to meet its net-zero target by 2050. The opportunity cost of such programs crucially depends on the value of knowledge spillovers that accrue from clean relative to other (emerging) technologies. Using patent information to measure the value of direct and indirect knowledge spillovers, we derive estimates for the expected economic returns of subsidising a particular technology field. Our method allows comparing fields by the returns a hypothetical additional subsidy would have generated within the UK or globally. Clean technologies are top-ranked in terms of within-UK returns, with Tidal and Offshore Wind showing particularly high returns. In terms of global returns, emerging technologies such as Wireless, as well as Electrical Engineering outperform Clean by a small margin. We also find that cross-border knowledge spillovers are important for all technology fields, with global return rates over ten times larger than within-UK ones. In sum, our results suggest that the opportunity cost of R&D support programs for clean innovation in the UK is low at worst

Special Libraries, May-June 1968

Volume 59, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1968/1004/thumbnail.jp