ABSTRACT
Production Flow Analysis (PFA) is implemented in four stages: Factory Flow Analysis, Group Analysis, Line Analysis and Tooling Analysis. This chapter gives examples of how PFA can be used to analyze and improve flow at different levels of a factory, such as Factory, Shop, Cell, or Machine. The examples are intended to illustrate that PFA can be used to improve flow in any high-mix low-volume work system, regardless of the size and scope of that system. Production Flow Analysis and Simplification Toolkit processes the products, quantities, routings, revenues data provided by any high-mix low-volume manufacturing facility using the different data mining algorithms. The “long tail” in the Product-Quantity Analysis produced by Production Flow Analysis and Simplification Toolkit indicated that they were offering an extremely diverse catalog of products and they were accepting many orders of very small quantities which resulted in numerous setups on the shop floor.
