Layout Design and Reconfiguration in a Collaborative Manufacturing Network
This study explores strategic agility of an automotive corporate group and its influence on facility layouts and operational performance. Strategic agility is viewed here as a firm’s strategic intent to achieve agile operations through collaboratively dep
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culty of Engineering, University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal 2 INESC TEC, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal {maria.m.azevedo,jorge.p.sousa}@inesctec.pt 3 School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal [email protected]
Abstract. This study explores strategic agility of an automotive corporate group and its influence on facility layouts and operational performance. Strategic agility is viewed here as a firm’s strategic intent to achieve agile operations through collaboratively deploying the layouts of a set of facilities, driven by a management focus on improving its responsiveness and adaptability to customers’ requirements. Our “collaborative multi-facility layout problem” involves the physical organization of departments between and inside several facilities geographically dispersed, that collaborate in manufacturing a complex product in a given time window. The model proposed in this work allows us to analyse the benefits of new horizontal collaboration forms with respect to several objectives, namely costs (material handling inside and between facilities, re-layout) and adjacency between departments. A case study of a first tier supplier in the automotive industry shows the applicability potential of the approach to real-life problems. The results show that horizontal collaboration among the facilities can positively influence the performance of the corporate group as a whole, and that of each firm individually. Keywords: Agile operations Multi-facility layout problems Multi-objective optimization Reconfigurable layouts Collaboration
1 Introduction In a more and more competitive world, companies easily recognize they need to permanently develop new and more sophisticated strategies, in order to maintain and increase their performance. The reconfiguration and continuous optimization of resources and production processes can be a way to reduce costs and increase their opportunities and profit [1]. The integration in Collaborative Networks (CN) can also be an important step to make organizations more effective and agile as part of broader manufacturing systems, and this may be specially important for SMEs, due to their reduced dimensions and high vulnerability. In this context, one of the current big challenges for industry is clearly the permanent need for rapid reconfiguration of © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved H. Afsarmanesh et al. (Eds.): PRO-VE 2016, IFIP AICT 480, pp. 545–556, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45390-3_46
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manufacturing enterprises, in response to changing requirements and opportunities [2]. In practice, the configuration of facility layouts comprises the physical organization (of departments, machines, workstations, storage spaces, etc.) inside a plant, thus facilitating production and material handling, and allowing flexible and efficient operations [3]. In
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