Chon-Huat Goh

Applying lean manufacturing principles to information intensive services

Lean manufacturing principles have been successfully applied to manufactured products for several decades to significantly reduce inventory in the supply chain and to increase productivity as well as the quality of the products. However, it is not clear whether such principles can be similarly applied to information intensive services that usually do not carry inventory. In this paper, we use an example of insurance claims handling process to illustrate how the lean manufacturing principles can be beneficially applied, albeit with some modifications, to information intensive services. Since such services do not have significant amount of inventory, we argue that minimising cycle time plays the same role as reducing inventory. We also show that a slightly different but parallel set of metrics should be used to evaluate the performance of the system after the implementation of lean principles to information intensive services.

Analytic hierarchy process for robot selection

Abstract Investment decisions involving robots are capital intensive and are usually made by a committee of experts from different functional backgrounds within a company. In spite of this knowledge, most models in the literature for robot selection assume that there is only a single decision maker. In this paper, a robot selection model that incorporates the inputs from multiple decision makers is provided. This model is based on the analytic hierarchy process method, and both the subjective and objective criteria for robot selection are used. It does not assume that the decision makers have achieved a consensus; that is, they may not agree on evaluations of the robots with respect to each of the criteria. A numerical example is used to illustrate the model.

An empirical assessment of influences on POM research

Researchers in the field of production and operations management (POM), and those who evaluate them, need a clear, up-to-date picture of forums available for scholarly discourse in the field. Yet the literature contains no recent, large-scale, objective study of such publishing forums. We present the results of such a study. We employ a citation analysis methodology to examine citation trends for books, proceedings, and journals, and to determine a relative ranking of journals influencing POM research. Results of a previously reported subjective journal ranking were used to determine five base journals for our citation analysis. The data collection effort produced over 30,000 citations for the years 1989-1993. The journal rankings generated by our study are compared with those of the earlier subjective studies in the POM field.

Designing group technology manufacturing systems using heuristics branching rules

Group technology (GT) has been proposed to increase productivity in manufacturing. The basic idea of GT is to exploit the similarity between parts and manufacturing processes. Parts similar in design and manufacture are grouped into part families. Machines are organized into machine cells to process part families. The problem of forming part families and machine cells is referred to as the GT problem. In this paper, we evaluate several branching rules for a branch-and-bound algorithm for solving the GT problem. Furthermore, we develop another branching rule to deal with the general GT problem in which exceptional machines are considered. The computational experience is also reported.

A Hierarchical System of Performance Measures for Concurrent Engineering

As firms respond to increased competitive pressures by adopting new strategies, it becomes necessary to identify and measure factors that reflect the successes or failures of such strategies In this paper, we address the issue of performance measures for one such strategy—con current engineering Traditional accounting-based performance measures are inappropriate for monitoring and diagnosing deficiencies at the operational (or process) level Here, we propose a three level hierarchical system of process based metrics for the product delivery performance achieved with concurrent engineering Metrics at the primary level monitor performance and serve as a basis for benchmarking Metrics at the secondary and tertiary levels diagnose performance, that is, they help explain results obtained at the primary level

Perishable inventory systems with batch demand and arrivals

In this paper we consider a perishable inventory system in which stored items have finite lifetimes. We assume that both the arrival of and demand for items are batch Poisson processes with geometrically sized batches. We find the Laplace transform and first two moments for the times between shortages and the times between outdates of inventory.

A two‐stage procedure for designing a group technology system

Proposes a two‐stage procedure to design a group technology system. Formulates a 0‐1 quadratic programming model to allocate machines to machine cells and a criterion to form corresponding part families for group technology. The majority of current approaches assume only one copy of a machine type for allocation. This model allows for more than one copy of a machine type. While many approaches use a general integer programming package to solve the group technology problem, proposes a two‐stage procedure based on A* algorithm. Computational experience of the proposed algorithm is also reported.

Solving the partitioning problem in database design

Response time of a database system is largely determined by the number of secondary disk accesses required to process database transactions. To minimize disk accesses, a database file should be structured in such a way as to closely match data requirements of these transactions. The way in which data are organized for efficient processing of database transactions is called database partitioning. As data are stored in the form of tables in a relational database, data partitioning can be performed either vertically (i.e, along the attributes or columns) or horizontally (i.e., along the tuples or rows).

Analysis of the twisting department at Superior Cable Corporation: A case study

Abstract The production of communication cables involves four major serial operations, namely tandem, twisting, stranding, and jacketing. Superior Cable Corporation manufactures such communications cables at the Elizabethtown, Kentucky, plant. The bottleneck operation in this facility is the twisting department. In this paper, we used simulation to analyze the operations in the twisting department and provide several recommendations to improve the production capacity of this department. Several of our recommendations are successfully implemented.