Manufacturing flexibility is a major factor in development of production system. It also determines the level of competitiveness of manufacturing units and the ability of flexible production of goods compatible with the requirements of customers.

Now a day’s manufacturing companies face increasingly frequent and unpredictable market changes because of global competition, frequent introduction of new products and constantly varying product demand. To remain competitive, manufacturing companies must design manufacturing systems which will produce high quality products at low costs and allow rapid response to market changes and consumer needs. One such system discussed in this article is Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS).

Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) – Ability of a system to respond to potential internal or external changes affecting its value delivery in a timely and cost-effective manner. Flexibility for an engineering system is the ease with which the system can respond to uncertainty in a manner to sustain or increase its value delivery.

The first Flexible Manufacturing System named “System24” was introduced in England in 1960. It was designed to produce light flat alloy components.

Almost manufacturing companies are aware of FMS. I will briefly highlight the possible levels of flexibilities in FMS, which are – Basic Flexibilities, System Flexibilities and Aggregate Flexibilities.

Basic Flexibilities

• Material Handling Flexibility – Different part types can be transported and positioned properly at various machine tools in a system.
• Machine Flexibility – The ease due to which machine can possess multiple operations.
• Operation Flexibility – Alternative operation sequences can be used for a processing part type.

System Flexibility

• Product Flexibility – The volume of set of part types that can be manufactured in a system with minor setup.
• Process Flexibility – The volume of set of part types that system can produce without incurring any setup.
• Routing Flexibility – The alternative path that a part can effectively follow through a system for a given process plan.
• Volume Flexibility – Measure of a system’s capability to be operated profitably at different volumes of existing a part type.
• Expansion Flexibility – Ability to build a system and expand.

Aggregate Flexibilities

• Production Flexibility – The volume of set of part types that a system can produce without major investment in capital equipment.
• Market Flexibility – The ability of a system to efficiently adapt to changing market conditions.
• Program Flexibility – The ability of a system to run for reasonably long periods without external intervention.

Focused Flexibility Manufacturing Systems (FFMS’s) – It represents a competitive answer to cope with the need of customized flexibility and guarantee the optimal trade-off between productivity and flexibility. The customization of flexibility on specific production problems leads to the minimization of the system cost during its life cycle.

The required level of system flexibility impacts architecture of the system and explicit design of flexibility which leads to hybrid systems i.e. automated integrated systems in which parts can be processed by both general purpose and dedicated machines.

Designing a dedicated system in which the reconfiguration option can be implemented in the future when production changes occur this leads to design a system with the minimum level of flexibility required to cope with the present production problem.

Conclusion

Manufacturing companies face increasingly frequent and unpredictable market changes because of global competition, technological developments and constantly varying product demand. Analyze the used forms of production systems and notify that flexibility has very different importance. FMS have been adopted to produce a large variety of parts in small quantities and are conceived to react most of the possible changes.

The investment to acquire FMS is very high and may considerably affect the cost to produce a part and flexibility may be expensive for the needs of a manufacture. The FMS should be capable of manufacturing a large variety of components, loading and unloading tools and work-pieces automatically and operating virtually unattended for a long period.