Leaders for Manufacturing
Research Group 5
Design and Operation of Manufacturing Systems


Group Leaders
Stanley B. Gershwin, Senior Research Scientist, MIT
Thomas DeNoto, Polaroid Corporation

There are a number of important methodologies being applied to manufacturing operations in order to improve performance (e.g., SPC, TQM, JIT, DOE, Management of Constraints, and the like). Each of these methods implies a set of either mutually conflicting or compatible strategies, which may be assumed or explicitly stated. Assuming that each has merit but none alone is a panacea, this program seeks to understand how these fit together coherently, and under what conditions each is applicable, to make the integrated system operate better than one running under several independent strategies and methodologies.

This research program seeks to understand what strategies work well in the USA production system, and to define where these approaches are synergistic and where they are conflicting. What is a minimum set (or sets) needed to achieve world class behavior? How to best reward performance improvement?

The industrial members of Research Group 5 developed a mission statement which describes our goals and philosophy.


Go to LFM Research Programs page

Research Projects: Currently, the efforts of LFM Group 5 are devoted to the following research projects

Participants: LFM Research Group 5 is a collaboration between researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, many associated with the Leaders for Manufacturing program, and elsewhere and engineers and managers from industry.

Some Recent Results: As results become available, we will publicize them. Summaries of research produced by Research Group 5, or of related work, will be listed here. We expect that there will be frequent additions to this site, so check in often.

How to control a lean manufacturing system by Asbjoern M. Bonvik

We have had quite a number of responses to this item. Here's one.

How to design a production line that has a bottleneck by Stanley B. Gershwin

How We Helped Hewlett Packard Make Millions by Mitchell Burman

A quality tool for Kodak by George Hadjigeorgiou

Inspection Strategies for Multistage Production Systems with Time-Varying Quality by Michael Veatch, Gordon College


LFM Group 5 in the News! Click here for articles written about us.


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This site maintained by Stan Gershwin ( gershwin@mit.edu)
Last updated: March 31, 2000