Table of contents
2. Industrial production systems 1
2.2. The milestones of industrial production systems 2
3.1. The evolution of production philosophies 3
3.2. Similarities between today’s prominent production philosophies 5
3.3. Difference between today’s prominent production philosophies 6
4. Industry 4.0 and industrial production systems 7
4.2. Industry 4.0 Impacts on production systems 7
Reference 10
Abstract
In this article the important milestones in the development of industrial
production systems and current production philosophies have been summarized. The
similarities and differences between today’s prominent production philosophies
have been presented. The interrelations between production philosophies and
advanced data analysis, simulation, optimization tools have been discussed as
well.
Key words: industrial philosophy, industrial production system, lean production
Introduction
Production industries are one of the important industries, which produce and
manufacture various products. This industry makes a large influence in the
country’s economic growth and quality of life for its citizens because
production creates lasting wealth while also distributes wealth through
high-paying jobs.
The impact of globalization has created a new challenge for production
industries. The possibility for greater integration within the world economy
through movements of goods and services, capital, technology, and labor has been
leading to a market situation that is difficult to predict.
In order to be more competitive in the modern business world, the whole
manufacture industry is seeking a chance to transformation. The Industry 4.0
paradigm which makes industrial production entirely automated and interconnected
seems to play a vital role in every industrial fields.
Industrial production systems
Definition
A production system consists of material handling equipment, production machines
and tooling, control system, and others that promote the efficient use of
energy, material, resources, and equipment[10]. The main objective of an
industrial production system is to obtain financial profit through the tasks
which finished by operators and machines.
The milestones of industrial production systems
Dedicated production line
Producing large quantities of standardized products (also called mass
production) is the production system originated in the United States. This
production strategy began with the launch of Henry Ford's moving assembly line
and eventually led to high demand for products after World War II. In this era
of production, dedicated production lines represent a key paradigm for the
manufacturing industry. Dedicated production lines produced large quantities for
a single part type and very profitable when demand for this part is high [12].
However, with the development of commodity economy, customers are no longer
satisfied with single-type commodity and began to pursue different diversified
products. Because the traditional production management mode of less varieties
and large quantities ignores the individual needs of customers, it is more and
more unable to meet the needs of the market. In addition, the current industrial
products have a significant feature: the price is getting cheaper and cheaper.
In this case, the advantages of traditional production management mode have
become defects: in the traditional production management mode, the finish goods
stacked in warehouses form a large number of inventories. As the price of the
products continues to fall, these stocks are in the process of continuous
depreciation, which are huge losses to enterprises.
Flexible manufacturing system
The demand for product variety rose in the late 1980s, which leads to the
paradigm of mass customization. Since then, there has been a major increase in
the number of product variations offered by product manufacturers. The
segmentation of product market and international competition lead to the need
for FMS as a highly diversified and customized product development system.
Flexibility can be expressed in two aspects. One aspect refers to the flexible
response capacity of production capacity, that is, the small batch production
capacity of machinery and equipment. In this regard, flexible manufacture system
(FMS) could be defined as an automatic manufacturing system, which is composed
of several numerical control equipment, material handling, storage devices and
computer control system. It can be adjusted rapidly according to the change of
manufacturing tasks and production varieties.
Reconfigurable manufacturing system
With the computer technology development and widely application of internet, it
is possible for customers to take part in the production flow. Based on customer
needs and preferences, this co-development process enables customers to engage
in design, product modeling and simulation, fabrication, and assembly processes
that respond quickly to the needs and preferences of customers, by means of the
open-product architecture, the on-demand production systems, and adaptive
cyber-physical system. Because of the high cost of reconfiguration of FMS, the
concept of reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is introduced to solve the
problems in FMS.
Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) is a new manufacturing systems
paradigm that aims at achieving cost-effective and rapid system changes, as
needed and when needed, by incorporating principles of modularity,
integrability, flexibility, scalability, convertibility, and diagnosability[4].
RMS promises customized flexibility on demand in a short time, while Flexible
Manufacturing Systems (FMSs) provides generalized flexibility designed for the
anticipated variations and built-in a priori.
Production philosophies
The evolution of production philosophies
Since its development two centuries ago, the production industry has revolved
through several paradigms[1]. The first paradigm was Craft Production, which
created the product the customer requested at a high cost. There were no
production systems associated with this paradigm. Most of the production
industries during this year used manual processes by handmade. In addition, the
providers of craft products were confined to localized geographical regions,
hence such production was not scalable[2].
Scientific management
The initial concepts of modern production philosophies could be dated back to
1910s. With the scientific management presented by F. W. Taylor, it makes people
realize that management is a science that based on clear laws, regulations and
principles. Taylor's scientific management has two major contributions: one is
that management should move towards science; the other is the spiritual
revolution of labor and capital. Taylor believes that the fundamental purpose of
scientific management is to seek the highest labor productivity. The highest
work efficiency is the basis for both employers and employees to achieve
“maximum prosperity”. The important means to achieve the highest work efficiency
is to replace experience management with scientific and standardized management
methods. Inspired by Taylor’s scientific management, Henry Ford implemented the
assembly line concept in his car company. With the approaches of motion study
and standardized workflow, the average efficiency was 8 times higher than
before. Ford production system also indicates the beginning of mass production.
Toyota Production System
The widely spread of mass production system reduce the average costs of
industrial products dramatically. However, the growth of average salary per
workmen did not match the increase of industrial products, and caused the side
effect of over-production and even economic crisis. The Great Desperation swept
across the world. To some extent, it led to World War II which destroyed the
manufacture industry in Japan. In order to catch up with America’s automobile
industry, Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda, Japanese industrial engineers, developed
Toyota Production System (TPS) between 1948 and 1975. The main objectives of the
TPS are to design out overburden and inconsistency, and to eliminate waste. TPS
could be grounded on two main conceptual pillars: (1) Just-in-time – meaning
"Making only what is needed, only when it is needed, and only in the amount that
is needed". (2) Jidoka – (Autonomation) meaning "Automation with a human touch".
Theory of Constraint
In the 1970s, Eliyahu M. Goldratt proposed the concept of optimized production
timetable, which was called optimized production technology (OPT) in the 1980s.
OPT is essentially a resource-based bottleneck constraint plan. In 1983, OPT was
extended to the Theory of Constraints (TOC), forming a complete set of
management philosophy, starting from the constraints of the whole process,
improve the throughput of bottleneck process. The plan and control of constraint
theory is realized by DBR system, namely "drum", "buffer" and "rope" system.
The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any
manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very
small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC
uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of
the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom "a chain is no stronger
than its weakest link". This means that processes, organizations, etc., are
vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them or
at least adversely affect the outcome.
Lean production
The term “lean production” refers to the set of tools and techniques used to
streamline and improve a company’s production system. With its roots in the
Toyota Production System, lean production aims to boost productivity while
reducing waste. Companies that successfully embrace lean production methods can
achieve impressive improvements in their performance. The superiority of a lean
production system was first identified by Womack and Jones during their research
on Japanese carmakers. Initially, it was believed that lean was only applicable
to production, whereas today we know those principles can be applied in any
sector.
Similarities between today’s prominent production philosophies
Today’s prominent production philosophies are Lean Production (LP) and Theory of
Constraint (TOC), while the main part of Toyota Production System is integrated
into LP. also Taylorism seems outdated in the modern business world. The common
points of constraint theory and lean production are as follows.
1. Pursue perfection. The goal is constantly changing, so we keep improving and
pursuing perfection to achieve the goal. TOC is consistent with LP. Both LP and
TOC emphasize that efforts must be made to continuous improvement. In the
process of improving the company, the participation of workers is very
important.
2. Demand-pull. Both TOC and LP advocate the pull production principle, and the
use of control technology is based on the market to pull the flow of products.
The pull concept of LP is to use Kanban. People who produce upstream should
produce only when they see the requirements of downstream customers. The pull
type of TOC is drum – buffer - rope (DBR) driving source. As a method of market
demand, DBR provides the basis for planning constraints. It is a production
process based on the distribution of any material.
3. Material flow. In this respect, the importance of flow is emphasized, and the
material is expected to flow like water to meet the requirements of synchronous
production. The management principle of synchronization is to balance logistics
movement rather than production capacity. This is the flow advocated by TOC and
LP. LP has extended the concept of flow from within the factory to outside the
factory, to the process of design and order acceptance.
4. Value stream. LP and TOC both emphasize value flow. The analysis of value
stream shows that not only the increment of value chain of production, but also
non value-added activities are interdependent. Both LP and TOC are deeply aware
that everyone's job in the company is to turn inventory into production and
sales. Define the system and create an actual process flow.
5. Value. Both constraint theory and lean thinking emphasize customer value
orientation, and customer value is the most important. Lean values can only be
defined by the end customer. Similarly, TOC's view is that production and sales
are paid for by customers. Therefore, customer demand plays a decisive role in
increasing the output of products.
Difference between today’s prominent production philosophies
1. Different emphasis in the improvement process. TOC and lean have completely
different emphasis: LP emphasizes reducing waste. TOC emphasizes increasing
production and sales.
2. The object of value stream. The significant difference between them is how to
define “self value stream”. LP defines value streams around specific products.
The disadvantage of this view is that some of the company's resources can be
used for many products. LP is suitable for reorganizing equipment resources for
specific products to form a production line. This leads to the potential
underutilization of some machines and equipment. Unfortunately, this
underutilization can sometimes change unconstrained resources into constrained
resources. TOC's view of value stream is to include shared resources in value
stream. In TOC, enterprises often arrange production around several products
through the common resources that interact with those products.
3. Inventory. TOC's view inventory a necessary part of the whole production
system. The only purpose of inventory is to support production and sales over a
period of time. In some cases, a buffer is maintained in the upstream process to
avoid changing inventory. The method of DBR is used to achieve synchronous flow
of inventory. On the contrary, LP lacks a realistic view of buffer inventory,
believing that all inventory is a waste. This view is based on the concept of
single-piece material flow.
4. Production capacity. Like excess inventory, LP sees excess capacity as a
waste. Starting from the design of the assembly line, consider that each piece
is in operation or stopped due to quality problems.
5. Cost accounting. Traditional accounting system emphasizes direct labor cost
accounting. However, in LP, administration expenses become the main cost, which
may be 20 times the direct labor cost. Staff with multi skills start to maintain
equipment and do other work, direct and indirect labor costs for cost accounting
has become very vague. Lean's cost accounting management expense is based on the
production time of products in the system, not based on direct labor hours and
machine hours. The cost viewpoint of TOC is that the inventory cost only
includes the cost of raw materials. Labor and other indirect costs are part of
the operating costs, which are controlled by the factory and not allocated to a
specific product. Gross profit = selling price - raw materials, net profit =
gross profit - operating expenses. The managers use gross profit maximization to
make variety decision and analysis.
Industry 4.0 and industrial production systems
Concept
Industry 4.0 is a strategic initiative recently introduced by the German
government. The goal of the initiative is transformation of industrial
manufacturing through digitalization and exploitation of potentials of new
technologies[5]. An Industry 4.0 production system is thus flexible and enables
individualized and customized products.
Generally, Industry 4.0 technologies include big data, cloud solutions, machine
learning, AR/VR, IoT, etc. A typical Industry 4.0 application project could be
break down as following rough principles. Machines and controllers are widely
connected, to transit and process some basic data and orders. Big data generated
by machine sensors are the raw material that ‘feed’ the ML models to train and
return the prediction or analyzation results. AR/VR are better approach for
humans to observe or apply the results in a more friendly way. Base on the
current level of technology or budget control reasons, sometimes the computing
performance of user terminal is limited, and we can integrate cloud solutions
into some bottleneck process, which perform complex calculations and processing
in the high-performance servers on the cloud.
Industry 4.0 Impacts on production systems
The main key tech of Industry 4.0 is Cyber-physical production system (CPS)[6].
The application of CPS in a smart factory is called cyber-physical production
system (CPPS). The industry 4.0 technologies can be clustered into 3 categories:
Data acquisition and data processing, machine to machine communication and
human-machine interaction[6].
M2M technologies like Internet of Things, is the solid material foundation and
precondition of the data processing stage. Data acquisition and data processing
technologies such as big data and advanced analytics plays an important role in
Lean production. The Industry 4.0 Impacts matrix on Lean production systems is
shown as follow.
The matrix shows that M2M technologies like Internet of Things will benefit
almost every aspects of Lean except 5S, teamwork, man-machine separation. Big
data and Analytics’ contributions are similar to M2M, but less benefit to pull
flow. Cloud computing impacts some aspects of Lean, such as Kaizen, JIT, Jidoka,
Heijunka and standardization. HMI such as VR, AR are more effective in 5S,
Kaizen, standardization, man-machine separation, people and teamwork.
The interrelations between production philosophies and advanced data analysis, simulation, optimization tools
Production philosophies can contribute to more effective use of advanced data analysis, simulation and optimization tools.
Based on the ideas of Lean, the continuous improvement is an ultimate goal that
both managers and workers should strive for. The overall evaluation criteria are
not only the macro-data like profit or costs which high-level leaders
concentrates on, but also daily performance in production line, for instance,
the running time, stop time, wait time of each machine, the work time, morale,
efficiency of each employee. It means that advanced data analysis, simulation
and optimization tools should be applied for frontline workers primarily.
However, it is easy to sink into “the ocean of data” when pursuing the details
of data blindly. Just like the bottleneck analysis in TOC and waste elimination
in LP, it is also important to distinguish which data is useless, which data is
useful, and which data is critical. Otherwise, it will be quite slow while
running the optimization tools, if the computing resource is limited.
Advanced data analysis, simulation and optimization tools can contribute to a successful implementation of a production philosophy into a production system
Lean and process stability are the basis of value-added transformation in
production, that is, lean production is used to find the optimal or better
combination of operations, by simplifying, merging, combining, replacing and
changing the connection between business processes; by changing the mode of
man-machine combination; by replacing manual operation with intelligent
equipment and optimizing the process, process simplification is realized to
improve the production integration efficiency[7]. The advanced data analysis,
simulation and optimization tools can play vital roles in the optimization
process.
At the same time, there are measurable points in the production process. In
order to achieve the expected goal of process management and solve the problems,
we must apply the feedback data control technology and establish the process
feedback data control system to make each process in a controllable state.
According to the feedback data information, we can improve the operation status
of each process by changing the input factors and control variables with real
time control, solve the problems in the process operation in time, and
coordinate the operation of each process. When the process operation state
deviates from the control target, it should be adjusted in time. It also
corresponds to the bottleneck optimization in TOC, improve overall throughput by
controlling and increasing the bottleneck capacity.
Conclusion
The milestones of industrial production systems include dedicated production
line in 1910s which indicates the beginning of mass production; the flexible
manufacturing system in 1980s which indicates the beginning of mass
customization. Today’s prominent production philosophies are Lean Production
(LP) and Theory of Constraint (TOC), these production styles have similarities
and differences. The Industry 4.0 technologies have huge impacts on LP.
Production philosophies can contribute to more effective use of advanced data
analysis, simulation and optimization tools, vice versa.
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