Allocation of Improvement Strategies in a Flow Shop with Two Capacity Constrained Resources

Abstract

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.