Production Processes

Mats Larsson

Chapter 6 in The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth, 2004, pp 66-71 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Material flows are different from information flows. It will always take time to move materials and assemble components into products. This time has already been dramatically reduced in many instances and in many cases it can be further reduced in the future, but clearly we cannot take away more than the time that remains in a process. In the case of the schematic example taken from Forrester above, the whole process took 19 weeks. When the whole process now takes only 2½ weeks it is obvious that material flows and information flows have been speeded up and that the improvement of a total of 16½ weeks cannot be repeated. The maximum improvement that is now possible is 2½ weeks, out of which a substantial part is now value-added time. Thus, the opportunity to improve the process further is smaller and it gradually becomes more difficult to decrease total cycle time because there is less time left. It might still be possible to reduce unproductive time and the amount of time needed in production and in the supply chain. This can be done by designing products in a smarter way so that they become easier and less expensive to produce, or by using fewer suppliers, who can be located close to the assembly plant. However, the value of these improvements will be less than those made when the process took 19 weeks.

Keywords: Supply Chain; Storage Facility; Enterprise Resource Planning; Automate Production; Assembly Plant (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-51143-9_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230511439

DOI: 10.1057/9780230511439_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().