Discuss how a manufacturing facility takes raw material and transforms it into a finished product.
5. Define the term “program of instructions.”
6. List and discuss the four typical manufacturing operations.
7. List and explain the factors that determine a finished product’s product definition.
8. Define and discuss the four standard manufacturing systems. Focus your explanation on the type of products produced by each system.
9. What is the difference between a manufacturing system and a manufacturing support system?
10. Define automation and the three major types.
11. What technologies fall under the programmable automation category? Include a definition of each.
12. Discuss the five performance measures of manufacturing.
13. What manufacturing performance measure combines and summarizes many of the individual measures into one all-encompassing metric?
14. Define productivity and provide three examples of how to improve it.
15. Discuss the five automation strategies defined in the chapter.
1. http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/automation Groover, M.P. (2001) Automation, Production Systems and Computer-Integrated
2. Manufacturing, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey
3. Sumanth, David J. (1994). Productivity Engineering and Management, McGraw-Hill
4. Kandray, Daniel E. (2004). Comparison of fixed automation and flexible automation from a productivity standpoint, Society of Manufacturing Engineers Technical Paper TP04PUB206
5. Machinery’s Handbook, 25th ed. (1996). Industrial Press, Inc., New York, New York
6. http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/productivity
7. Radhakrishnan, Arun (2008). Intel Announces Two Billion Transistor Computer Chip, IT News Digest, February
8. http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/?p=2050
Automation Justification and Productivity Concepts
Contents
2.1 Automation Justification and Productivity
2.3 Process Outputs and Mathematical Concepts for Quantifying Production
2.4 Process Inputs and Manufacturing Costs
2.5 Comparing Alternatives with Productivity Calculations
2.6 The Impact of Production Volume on Alternatives
2.7 Productivity and the USA Principle
Objective
The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate how to use productivity calculations to identify, evaluate, and justify automation.
2.1 Automation Justification and Productivity
Implementing programmable automation typically requires substantial investment, or capital expenditure, which upper management must deem justified. Most collegiate engineering and technology programs offer engineering economic analysis courses that present numerous methods of justifying capital expenditures, such as developing cash flows over the life of the project and considering the time value of money. However, the decision of whether or not to invest in an automation project is still very difficult for a firm to make because of the large number of variables to be considered. Many larger firms have arcane justification methodologies. A productivity analysis, on the other hand, is a simple, single metric that can clearly show when an automation project should be funded. It compares the performance of the system before and after the automation is applied. In fact, it provides such great scrutiny of a system that it should be used prior to any automation plans. In so doing, the automation strategies, defined in Chapter 1, can be accurately applied. This chapter focuses on how productivity calculations are used to identify, evaluate and justify automation.
Recall that the productivity of a manufacturing system is determined by the simple ratio,
productivity = output/input,
where, as we will see, the input and output units are number of parts per monetary unit.
For manufacturers of discrete products a system’s output is the number of parts produced over a certain time frame. The system inputs are those resources needed to acquire and convert raw material into a finished product over that same time frame. Typical resource input comprises labor, capital, material, and energy. Even though each of these inputs is vastly different, they can be expressed in monetary terms. Thus, productivity will be expressed in terms of the number of parts produced per dollar of input (# of parts/$ input). This is a simple and effective means of accessing a manufacturing operation, machine, process, system or facility’s performance.
Obviously, the time frame over which a form of input is measured should be the same as the output that results. For products manufactured in high quantities, the
