This course provides ways to analyze manufacturing systems in terms of material flow and storage, information flow, capacities, and times and durations of events. Fundamental topics include probability, inventory and queuing models, optimization, and linear and dynamic systems. Factory planning and scheduling topics include flow planning, bottleneck characterization, buffer and batch-size analysis, and dynamic behavior of production systems.
In a series of three interactive exercises, learners explore the relationship between process cycle time and defect detection, and between process cyle time and smaller batch sizes. The techniques of lean/JIT are applied to achieve the continuous improvement (kaizen) goal of reducing inventory by pursuing one-piece flow.
