A framework for material flow assessment in manufacturing systems

Improving material efficiency is widely accepted as one of the key challenges facing manufacturers in the future. Increasing material consumption is having detrimental impacts on the environment as a result of their extraction, processing, and disposal. It is clear that radical improvements in material efficiency are required to avoid further environmental damage and sustain the manufacturing sector. Current resource management approaches are predominantly used to improve material consumption solely in economic terms. Meanwhile, environmental assessment methodologies can determine sources of significant environmental impact related to a product; however, a methodology to effectively assess material efficiency in production systems is currently not available. This paper highlights the benefits of material flow modeling within manufacturing systems to support advances in increased material efficiency, proposing a framework for “material flow assessment in manufacturing” that promotes greater understanding of material flow and flexibility to explore innovative options for improvement

Design and realisation of an integrated methodology for the analytical design of complex supply chains

Supply chain systems are inherently complex and are dynamically changing webs of relationships. Wider product variety, smaller production lot sizes, more tiers and different actors involved in coordinated supply chains also cause supply chain complexity and presents major challenges to production managers. This context has led modern organizations to implement new supply chain paradigms and adopt new techniques to support rapid design, analysis and implementation of the new paradigms. The present research focuses to develop an integrated methodology which can support the analytical design of complex supply chains. [Continues.

THE EFFECT OF INTERNAL STATIC MANUFACTURING COMPLEXITY ON MANUFACTURING PERFORMANCE

Manufacturing systems are complex. They consist of many interrelated subsystems and elements. This study investigates the effect on performance due to the complexity resulting from system design, i.e. internal static manufacturing complexity. The quantitative measure, ISMC, consisting of eight measurable complexity elements is proposed. This new measure of complexity was then tested with another existing measure of internal static manufacturing complexity proposed by Frizelle and Woodcock (1995). A large set of simulation experiments, each modeling a general batch-type manufacturing system, was employed to test the effects of the overall complexity measure, ISMC, and the eight individual elements on five measures of manufacturing performance. The experimental design included two levels for each of the eight static complexity elements and two levels for the environmental variable, due date tightness. The results indicated that neither the proposed measure, ISMC, nor the prior Frizelle and Woodcock\u27s measure demonstrate a practical level of predictive validity. Three of the eight individual components making up ISMC were correlated to manufacturing performance. These were the breadth of the product structures, the depth of the product structures, and the number of different end-products in a manufacturing system

A Study on the Role of Information Systems in Organizational Growth: A Longitudinal Case Study

The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated framework which can explain how the role of information systems evolves in organizations. To develop the framework, two critical dimensions, each of which is classified further into three categories, are selected to explain the role of information systems in organizational growth: the purpose of information processing, the scope of information processing. As these are considered to be major dimensions underpinning much research regarding the role of information systems in organizations, the framework proposed in this paper could serve to integrate much existing research, while stimulating future research aimed at verifying its applicability