DATE: Thursday, December 7, 2006
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the Philip M. Morse Reading Room, E40-106
ABSTRACT
Most traditional production system design is based on the idea
that workers are tied to specific tasks or workstations. This
notion has deep roots in philosophies such as standardization
of work and division of labor, which were introduced during the
industrial revolution. These concepts naturally evolved into
rigid production systems, which could not respond adequately
to changes in demand. However, to survive in the current intensive
global competition, new strategies have evolved that are much
more flexible. For example, Toyota introduced the idea of adapting
to demand changes through attaining flexibility in the number
of workers. This is called Shojinka in Japanese. The main factor
in Shojinka is to use agile (cross-trained) workers who have
the proper skills to perform different tasks, and therefore they
can be in charge of more than one workstation.
The difficulty
in modeling production systems with agile workers is that we
must combine the complications of modeling rigid production systems
with the complexity of scheduling the agile workers. The first
step in analyzing these complex production systems is to obtain
insight by developing models for systems that are smaller yet
similar. Theretofore, in the first part of this talk, we focus
on the scheduling problem of an agile (fully cross-trained) worker
in a serial production system. Then, in the second part we introduce
an Index that is capable of measuring the flexibility achieved
through workforce agility. We present examples in production
systems (e.g. Conwip lines) as well as service operations systems
(e.g. Call Centers) and show that our deterministic Index can
accurately predict the performance of stochastic production or
service systems with agile workforce.
