Transport effort: a metric for the evaluation and benchmarking of automotive assembly plants

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2004-01-01
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Sly, David
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John Jackman
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Sly, David
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Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering
The Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering teaches the design, analysis, and improvement of the systems and processes in manufacturing, consulting, and service industries by application of the principles of engineering. The Department of General Engineering was formed in 1929. In 1956 its name changed to Department of Industrial Engineering. In 1989 its name changed to the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering.
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Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering
Abstract

Automotive assembly plants are unique from other industrial facilities in that they combine high output volume with high part counts (over 4,000 per vehicle) and high variety in a product flow layout involving a large quantity of fixed position material handling equipment. While assembly plants share common factory layout issues such as, dock placement, storage placement, transport batch sizes and aisle design, it is the high material flow volumes of large and heavy products coupled with the less layout flexibility, due to fixed equipment, that make automotive assembly plants uniquely suited for the evaluation and benchmarking metrics proposed in this dissertation.;This dissertation proposes new metrics capable of evaluating and comparing automotive assembly plant designs based on the efficiency of each plant's aisle design, dock placement and intensity allocation. These performance metrics are generated from readily available information and are evaluated against hypothetical "best case" and "worst case" scenarios. These metrics have been developed for use by practitioners to design and benchmark automotive assembly plants with readily available application software such as MS Excel, AutoCAD and FactoryFLOW.

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Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2004