Optimal configuration of manufacturing cells for high flexibility and cost reduction by component substitution

In the current competitive market manufacturing companies are driven by significant price pressure as well as high fluctuation in demand and are faced with the challenge of producing cost-effectively. Especially serial and variant manufacturers struggle to achieve high capacity utilization even though they consistently try to reduce the gap between the requested capacity and available capacity. Already in the procurement phase of manufacturing resources enterprises seek for defining the available capacity to cover the requested capacity precisely. However, due to fixed costs, the level of available capacity must be carefully decided. Methods for production planning and improvement are used but it is still difficult to avoid capacity bottlenecks or waste completely. Consequently, the objective is the efficient use of spare capacity. For this purpose, in this article a new method for an optimal configuration of manufacturing cells is described which allows the increase of flexibility as well as the reduction of costs by component substitution. Therefore, both the component substitution and optimal configuration of manufacturing cells will be described. The main result is a cost-optimized and highly utilized manufacturing process.