An Approach of a Flexible Manufacturing Thinking System for Lean-Flow Implementation for Mass Customization industries
Chris Chatzopoulos
Abstract: The paper is based on systems thinking for the development of a flexible manufacturing system sustained by methodologies of agile manufacturing philosophy. This system of conducting is thought to be a basic platform for implementing a lean-flow manufacturing concept for a large variety of industries. Its ambition is to decrease the time of designing, scheduling and executing manufacturing for Mass Customization environment. In a chaotic demand, the industries know the exact details for production a very short time, after the customized order. The cost and the waste of organizing and managing the utilities and the resources are very high. Developing an IT platform and customize it according to the preferences of the industries is one step closer to decrease the cost and the waste concerned. Such an IT-tool is proposed to be a configurator named "Flow Customizer". It will be a tool which customizes the lean-flow for a large variety of industries. In this paper the concept of such a configurator is presented based on flexible system thinking, expressed by algorithms that need still to be modeled using advanced mathematics and tested in real conditions.
Key Words: System Thinking Platform, Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Agile Manufacturing, Lean-Flow Manufacturing, Mass Customization, Configurators, Flow Customizer.
Coauthors: Dr. Alexander Tsigkas Ass. Prof. Mr. Christos Chatzopoulos PhD Student