The main goal of this paper is to identify the best strategy to allocate
improvement programs in a flow shop with two capacity constrained
resources. We collected data from a manufacturing company, and we used
them to conduct a simulation with the System Dynamics-Factory Physics
model. The main variables considered were the mean time between failures
and the mean time to repair, and lead time was the output. Strategies used are
mainly focused, distributed, and hybrid. Findings show the effect of the
allocation of different improvement strategies on lead time reduction. We
indicated that for the flow shop analyzed the focused strategies delivered the
best results. When it is not possible to perform a large investment in the
capacity-constrained resource, companies should use hybrid approaches. An
important contribution is a hybrid approach, which is a new way of directing
efforts of improvements. Results showed that both strategies, hybrid time to
repair improvement and hybrid time between failures improvement, delivered
better results compared to the respective distributed strategies.
