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Structure
13.1 Introduction
Objectives
13.1 INTRODUCTION
Computer integrated manufacturing (CIM), automated inspection systems, automated material handling, automated storage and retrieval systems, CNC machines and tool handling systems, flexible manufacturing systems, cellular manufacturing system, Operation aspects of CIM, computer aided process planning, material planning for CIM system, and control and simulation of CIM all we have discussed in earlier sections. These topics are directing the technology of manufacturing towards the fully automated factory of the future. In this unit, we will discuss about the trends in manufacturing, the future automated factory, and their social impact on society.
Objectives
After studying this unit, you should be able to understand the trends in manufacturing, explain the future automated factory, and appreciate the social impacts of automation of factors.
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items technologically out of date. The use of CAD/CAM systems makes it possible for companies to accomplish the synthesis, analysis, evolution, and documentation of the design in much less time than with manual methods. More Customized Products The products available to customers are becoming more individual and custom engineered. To meet the particular needs of the customers there are more special options and features. This results smaller lot sizes. The number of products and components made in small batch sizes is expected to represent the majority of future activity in the world. Increased Emphasis on Quality and Reliability The Japanese have demonstrated that it is possible to manufacture high-quality products at relatively low cost. American producers, especially in the automobile industry, have responded to customer pressure for higher quality and the trend has spread to the other industries as well. When the consequences of poor product quality are considered, it makes sense to strive for higher quality in manufacturing products. New Materials New and unconventional materials are being selected by designers of new products. In the automobile industry this trend is exemplified by the use of composite materials for car body panels in place of traditional sheet steel. The advantages of the newer materials include lighter weight and greater shape and styling flexibility. Considering the size of the automobile market each year and the amount material involved per car, the impact of this material substitution on the U. S. economy will be substantial. The aircraft industry is another growing user of composites. Other materials being used with greater frequency in design applications traditionally satisfied by metals include plastics and ceramics. These nontraditional materials must be shaped by processing techniques that are completely different form those used in metalworking. There are significant challenges confronting industries to deal with these new technologies. Growing Use of Electronics Now-a-days, the electronics industry is growing at a much faster rate than the traditional mechanical equipment industry. New products of all types are being designed with more or more on-board electronics for data processing, control, and communication with humans. Electronics and microelectronics manufacturing place unusual demand on the workplace for clean environment. Human workers are incompactable with these environmental requirements because they generate contaminants at a high rate. A prevailing viewpoint among electronics manufacturing experts is that human being must be eliminated from direct participation in the manufacture of microelectronics products. This means automation. Greater Use of Computer Over the last decade there has been a growing interest in and implementation of computers to plan, monitor, control, and manage manufacturing operations. There is no sign that this trend will be eliminated in the future. Examples include CAD for product design, CAM for manufacturing planning, programmable logic controllers and computers for process control and personal computer for everyone. Just-in-Time Manufacturing The concept of just-in-time (JIT) production is simple. It is a means of reducing inventory of raw materials and purchased parts. The benefit to the large company of following a just-in-time policy with its suppliers is that inventories are
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dramatically reduced. Instead of keeping several days for supply of parts on the hand for final assembly, the inventory buffer is reduced to hours. Outsourcing Outsourcing is a method used by different companies to subcontract the manufacture of the components of their products to outsides firms. Instead of producing the components themselves, they find it more convenient and less expensive to have other produces the components. In most cases, the large firms continue to do the final assembly of the product at their own plants where they can maintain better control over product quality. The advantages of outsourcing includes reduced labour, elimination of equipment that is poorly utilized, avoidance of major investments in new manufacturing facilities, reduction in inventory, and dealing with companies that are expert at certain manufacturing technologies. Point-of-Use Manufacture This approach is closely related to JIT but it is applied inside a company. Point-of-Use manufacture means that the workstations making the components are located along the assembly line immediately before the assembly operations they serve. In this way, the components flow directly into the assembly stations. This substantially reduces the amount of work-in-process and time delay. The risk suffered by the company is that one of the component production operations will fail and cause the entire assembly line shut down. To reduce this risk, a small float of parts is usually maintained between the workstation that makes the parts and the workstation that assembles them. Pressure to Reduce Inventories During the late 70s and during much of the 80s, interest rates increased to historic levels. Companies realized that there was a very high investment cost associated with keeping inventories. Attempts were made to reduce inventories of all types. In manufacturing the focus was on reducing work-in-process.
SAQ 1
What are the different trends in manufacturing?
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In the discrete-product manufacturing industries, complex problems are encountered in achieving the same level of automation because of the difficulties in processing, assembling, handling, and inspecting a diverse mix of products. In the multiproduct situation, the main difficulty in the manufacturing is the huge amount of information that must be processed for each different product made. Each component in the product has its unique geometry specification, material definition, and processing route sheet. For the product itself, there are parts lists, operating specifications, assembly drawings, and so on. Production schedules must be formulated, materials must be ordered, labour and equipment must be planned, and so it goes. It has been estimated that only about one-eighth of the people in the factory are directly concerned with processing the product, while the remaining seven-eighths are handling and processing information. It is the information system in the future factory that will implement the control function in manufacturing.
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reduced waste in the form of chips or other scrap material, reduced manufacturing cost and reduced number of operations required to form the part. Finally, the growth of microelectronics technology has forced the development of specialized chemical, optical, and physical processing methods to create large scale integrated (LSI) and very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits on miniature silicon chips. These processes include refined photolithography techniques, chemical etching, diffusion, ion implementation, and electron beam etching. It is anticipated that some of these processing technologies will find many industrial applications beyond microelectronics. In the assembly area, some of the biggest productivity improvements are expected to come from a greater awareness of the impact of product design on assembly methodology. By designing parts for ease of automatic assembly, the number of assembly steps and corresponding costs will be reduced. Total product cost can be minimized by achieving an optimum balance between the component costs and assembly costs.
The first of these problems involves the capability of the material handling system to deliver different work parts to different cells in the plant according to the particular routing of the part. In conceptual model of the automated factory, the various parts and products will each require its own set of processing operations, and the handling system must be able to provide these flexible routings. This flexibility will be achieved by using computer control of the material system. The most flexible of the material handling systems is an automated guided vehicle system. Because of its flexibility and capability to be controlled by computer, it is one of the fastest-growing segments of the material handling industry today. The second problem area is the difficulty in transferring parts between the material handling systems, production workcells, and the storage systems in the plant. This problem is referred as mechanical interface problem. A mechanical interface is required each time a part is transferred from one type of system in the factory to another. The transfer must be accomplished within certain locational requirements. The method of transferring loads between systems in the future automated factory will probably make use of standard-sized pellets. Different pellets have different fixtures to handle the diverse mixture of products made in factory.
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The future automated factory will be an extension of todays Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). One might consider the automated factory to be a very large FMS. However, the problems of operating and controlling the automated manufacturing system become significantly larger as the production capacity of the system increases. There are practical limits that must be imposed on the size of the factory. The focused factory is one that concentrates its efforts on a limited, concise, manageable set of products, technologies, volumes, and markets. The future automated factory is likely to be a focused factory, limited its activities to certain families of products which can be produced using a limited set of processing technologies. In effect, the focused factory uses a modified version of the principle of standardization. There are opportunities for standardization even in the production of small to medium lot sizes of diverse products. These opportunities include : Design Standards : CAD/CAM system tends to promote standardization by building it into the design software. Raw Materials : Products can be selected so that the variety of raw materials is limited to a confined set. Tooling : Many plants tend to allow the variety of tooling to grow out of hand. It should be possible to limit the numbers of different types of tooling and other supplies that are used. Processes and Methods : The variety of manufacturing processes and methods included in shop practice is limited to a manageable set.
SAQ 2
(a) (b) Describe the role of information system in automated factory. What are different opportunities for standarisation of factories?
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sometimes manual but not as well defined and not so repetitive. Many of the job classification for indirect labour require skill and training. As a consequence of the shift from direct to indirect labour in future factories, the rank of labour unions are likely to be adversely affected unless the unions can recruit in employment areas where they have traditionally not been successful. Highly skilled professional and semiprofessional workers have tended to be more confident about their employment security, and have associated more with management and professional staffs. Prospects for membership growth in these employment areas pose a difficult challenge for the unions. It is not possible that all workers who currently qualify for direct labour positions in todays conventional factories will qualify for indirect labour positions in the future automated factory. This will happen because of the difference in skill requirements. Direct labour jobs in production will be displaced. Some of the unskilled workers can be retained, but many will not be employable. For the worker who is affected, and for society, there is no denying that job displacement is a negative aspects of automation. However, if companies do not automate their factories of the future, there is likely to be no future for these companies. The negative impact on employment in this case would be far worse.
Worker safety The trends in the labour force to seek the employment in service sector and not in manufacturing.
These factors constituted the deriving force behind the development of automated assembly machines, transfer lines, NC, and other automated production systems of today are also the force for further advances, culminating in the computer-automated factory of the future.
SAQ 3
(a) (b) What will be the impact of future automated factory on labour? What are the different social and economic factors which promotes the development of automated factory?
13.6 SUMMARY
The introduction of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) will become a matter of survival for many industrial concerns in the coming years. Information technology will increasingly be recognized as a factor of production, not only influencing organizational structure, but also becoming a significant competitive factor. Factory of the future will have to perform the same basic manufacturing functions. Global competition and rapidly customer requirements are forcing major changes in the production styles and configuration of manufacturing enterprise. Traditional centralized manufacturing systems are not able to meet these requirements. In recent years, the internet has become the worldwide information platform for the sharing of information and data. Information processing is an important challenge in an internet-based manufacturing environment, and must facilitate distribution, heterogeneity, autonomy and cooperation.
Outsourcing
CAM
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CIM
: Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) is an application of computers in the field of sales, design, manufacturing and business of the company. CIM is used for integration of various manufacturing activities in a factory.
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FURTHER READING
Bouchor T. O., Computer Automation in Manufacturing, Chapman and Hall. Groover, M. P. (2001), Automation, Production Systems, and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 2nd Ed, Pearson Education: Singapore. Shankar, R. (2004), Industrial Engineering and Management, Galgotia Publications, New Delhi. Carrie, A. (1998), Simulation of Manufacturing Systems, John Wiley. Law, A. M. and Kelton, W. D. (1982), Simulation Modelling and Analysis, McGraw-Hill.
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