Flexible Manufacturing System

What does Flexible manufacturing system mean?

Flexible manufacturing system is a manufacturing system in which there is some amount of flexibility present. It is that flexibility that allows the system to react in the case of predictable or unpredictable changes. Flexible manufacturing system gives an advantage for the manufacturing firms in this quickly changing manufacturing environment.

The three main components of Flexible manufacturing system are:

• The flexibility to produce different products using the same machine, and to produce the same products in a different machine
• The flexibility to produce different products using the same machine
• The flexibility of machines to easily adapt to the changes in the product design

Categories of Flexible manufacturing system

• Machine flexibility: this allows the system’s ability to be changed based on the manufacturing environment to produce new product types.
• Routing flexibility: this allows using of multiple machines to perform same operation, the system also allows large scale changes in volume, capacity or capability.

Some of the advantages of Flexible manufacturing system include

• The system is faster
• The system uses low cost per unit
• Less wastage
• Work – in – progress inventory reduced.
• The system has greater labor productivity
• Better control over the quality of the product
• Fewer work stations.
• Reduced downtime
• You save a lot of time, money and effort
• Faster changes of tools and other machinery
• This system also has greater machine efficiency
• Increase on the reliability of the system.
• This system has less parts inventory
• This system is easily adaptable to CAD or CAM operations.

 Like two sides of a coin, Flexible manufacturing system also has some disadvantages in them. One of the main disadvantages of Flexible manufacturing system is the cost of implementing the system.

Many firms compete against each other based on the strength of the companies, now many companies prefer to compete on the flexibility of their manufacturing. Basically what this means is that the firms now prefer to have a flexible control on their products and the volume of the products, to shown their company superior to the others.