A NEW PERSPECTIVE IN MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS-DESIGN - TURBULENCE MANAGEMENT AND RAPID REINVENTION

Business philosophies such as continuous improvement and TQM have been in existence for some time now and embody a wealth of literature. Til e principles of Cellular Manufacturing together with various examples of its application and benefits are also well documented. The applicat ion of TQM to cellular environments is also well established: the depl oyment of pertinent measures, making visible performance information, and teamworking being but a few of the examples.Whilst these approache s have enabled manufacturing strategies to be developed and appropriat e systems to be implemented, adverse influences such as greater turbul ence in the external environment have been at play. Increased competit ion combined with customer demand for quality, speed, product performa nce and lower costs are putting an ever greater burden on manufacturin g, Not only do products need to be launched faster than ever, but manu facturing needs to be flexible in rapidly retuning its facilities. The move to cellular manufacturing, TQM or CIM or other techniques alone is thus no longer enough. instead, the challenge is increasingly one o f compressing the time it lakes to continually 're-invent' the manufac turing system in order to meet the prevailing demands of the market pl ace, The factors that cause manufacturing systems to behave sub optima lly are discussed. Particular reference is made to market triggered tu rbulence as exhibited by mix and volume changes and to internally trig gered turbulence such as design change. We show how these factors impa ct an the critical competitive dimension of time and by using case exa mples, we develop a framework for 'continual re-invention' of manufact uring systems so as to harness their full capabilities, By clearly dis tinguishing the processes which enable re-invention from the core manu facturing processes, we consider some issues critical to success: orga nization structures, skills profiles and the rare of people.