Abstract

In the era of mass customization and supply chain rivalry, managing product diversity is essential for survival in business. The use of common part for different products is a vital method of achieving the goal. The advantages of insertion of duplicate component in a product family are stated in literatures. Simulation or conceptual beliefs is employed in the majority of the researches and mainly considered single stage manufacturing. However, the mathematical models in the premises of multistage production are not available. In this paper, the part commonality notion is integrated with venerable manufacturing resources planning models for a multiproduct, multi-period and multistage manufacturing under a deterministic demand and lead time. A random distribution of quality and resources breakdown events glued with the models. The models are validated with real data from a Malaysian company and arbitrarily numerical scheme. The material requirement schedule is generated using the proposed models. The outcomes are compared with the same from the basic MRP II and live archrival data collected from the floor. It is found that the two schedules converge. However, the proposed models are bearing additional information of the location where to be available the parts in a time frame. The effects of commonality on cost, capacity and requirement schedule under the quality and breakdown troubles are discussed. It is observed that the use of common parts in manufacturing is always better over the non-commonality scenario in terms of production cost and capacity requirements.

Key words: Component commonality, mathematical model, MRP II, quality, breakdown.