What is flexible management system?

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a method for producing goods that is readily adaptable to changes in the product being manufactured, in which machines are able to manufacture parts and in the ability to handle varying levels of production. A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) gives manufacturing firms an advantage in a quickly changing manufacturing environment.

Globalization, fickling market requirements and modern lifestyle trends have put up tremendous challenge to manufacturing industries. In the current business scenario the competitiveness of any manufacturing industry is determined by its ability to respond quickly to the rapidly changing market and to produce high quality products at low costs. However, the product cost is no longer the predominant factor affecting the manufacturers’ perception. Other competitive factors such as flexibility, quality, efficient delivery and customer satisfaction are drawing the equal attention. Manufacturing industries are striving to achieve these capabilities through automation, robotics and other innovative concepts such as just-in-time (JIT), Production planning and control (PPC), enterprise resource planning (ERP) etc.

Flexible manufacturing is a concept that allows manufacturing systems to be built under high customized production requirements. The issues such as reduction of inventories and market-response time to meet customer demands, flexibility to adapt to changes in the market, reducing the cost of products and services to grab more market shares, etc have made it almost obligatory to many firms to switch over to flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) as a viable means to accomplish the above requirements while producing consistently good quality and cost effective products. FMS is actually an automated set of numerically controlled machine tools and material handling systems, capable of performing a wide range manufacturing operations with quick tooling and instruction changeovers.

The different types of flexibility that are exhibited by manufacturing systems are given below:

 1. Machine Flexibility. It is the capability to adapt a given machine in the system to a wide range of production operations and part styles. The greater the range of operations and part styles the greater will be the machine flexibility. The various factors on which machine flexibility depends are:  Setup or changeover time·  Ease with which part-programs can be downloaded to machines·  Tool storage capacity of machines·  Skill and versatility of workers in the systems·

2. Production Flexibility. It is the range of part styles that can be produced on the systems. The range of part styles that can be produced by a manufacturing system at moderate cost and time is determined by the process envelope. It depends on following factors:  Machine flexibility of individual stations·  Range of machine flexibilities of all stations in the system·

3. Mix Flexibility. It is defined as the ability to change the product mix while maintaining the same total production quantity that is, producing the same parts only in different proportions. It is also known as process flexibility. Mix flexibility provides protection against market variability by accommodating changes in product mix due to the use of shared resources. However, high mix variations may result in requirements for a greater number of tools, fixtures, and other resources. Mixed flexibility depends on factors such as:  Similarity of parts in the mix·  Machine flexibility·  Relative work content times of parts produced·

4. Product Flexibility. It refers to ability to change over to a new set of products economically and quickly in response to the changing market requirements. The change over time includes the time for designing, planning, tooling, and fixturing of new products introduced in the manufacturing line-up. It depends upon following factors:  Relatedness of new part design with the existing part family·  Off-line part program preparation·  Machine flexibility·

5. Routing Flexibility. It can define as capacity to produce parts on alternative workstation in case of equipment breakdowns, tool failure, and other interruptions at any particular station. It helps in increasing throughput, in the presence of external changes such as product mix, engineering changes, or new product introductions. Following are the factors which decides routing flexibility:  Similarity of parts in the mix·  Similarity of workstations·  Common tooling·

6. Volume Flexibility. It is the ability of the system to vary the production volumes of different products to accommodate changes in demand while remaining profitable. It can also be termed as capacity flexibility. Factors affecting the volume flexibility are:  Level of manual labor performing production·  Amount invested in capital equipment·

7. Expansion Flexibility. It is defined as the ease with which the system can be expanded to foster total production volume. Expansion flexibility depends on following factors:  Cost incurred in adding new workstations and trained workers·  Easiness in expansion of layout·  Type of part handling system used·

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An Industrial Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) consists of robots, Computer-controlled Machines, Numerical controlled machines (CNC), instrumentation devices, computers, sensors, and other stand alone systems such as inspection machines. The use of robots in the production segment of manufacturing industries promises a variety of benefits ranging from high utilization to high volume of productivity. Each Robotic cell or node will be located along a material handling system such as a conveyor or automatic guided vehicle. The production of each part or work-piece will require a different combination of manufacturing nodes. The movement of parts from one node to another is done through the material handling system. At the end of part processing, the finished parts will be routed to an automatic inspection node, and subsequently unloaded from the Flexible Manufacturing System.

The FMS data traffic consists of large files and short messages, and mostly come from nodes, devices and instruments. The message size ranges between a few bytes to several hundreds of bytes. Executive software and other data, for example, are files with a large size, while messages for machining data, instrument to instrument communications, status monitoring, and data reporting are transmitted in small size.

There is also some variation on response time. Large program files from a main computer usually take about 60 seconds to be down loaded into each instrument or node at the beginning of FMS operation. Messages for instrument data need to be sent in a periodic time with deterministic time delay. Other types of messages used for emergency reporting are quite short in size and must be transmitted and received with an almost instantaneous response. The demands for reliable FMS protocol that support all the FMS data characteristics are now urgent. The existing IEEE standard protocols do not fully satisfy the real time communication requirements in this environment. The delay of CSMA/CD is unbounded as the number of nodes increases due to the message collisions. Token Bus has a deterministic message delay, but it does not support prioritized access scheme which is needed in FMS communications. Token Ring provides prioritized access and has a low message delay, however, its data transmission is unreliable. A single node failure which may occur quite often in FMS causes transmission errors of passing message in that node. In addition, the topology of Token Ring results in high wiring installation and cost.

A design of FMS communication that supports a real time communication with bounded message delay and reacts promptly to any emergency signal is needed. Because of machine failure and malfunction due to heat, dust, and electromagnetic interference is common, a prioritized mechanism and immediate transmission of emergency messages are needed so that a suitable recovery procedure can be applied. A modification of standard Token Bus to implement a prioritized access scheme was proposed to allow transmission of short and periodic messages with a low delay compared to the one for long messages.[1]

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A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a manufacturing system in which there is some amount of flexibility that allows the system to react in case of changes, whether predicted or unpredicted. This flexibility is generally considered to fall into two categories, which both contain numerous subcategories.

The first category, machine flexibility, covers the system's ability to be changed to produce new product types, and ability to change the order of operations executed on a part. The second category is called routing flexibility, which consists of the ability to use multiple machines to perform the same operation on a part, as well as the system's ability to absorb large-scale changes, such as in volume, capacity, or capability.

Most FMS consist of three main systems. The work machines which are often automated CNC machines are connected by a material handling system to optimize parts flow and the central control computer which controls material movements and machine flow.

The main advantages of an FMS is its high flexibility in managing manufacturing resources like time and effort in order to manufacture a new product. The best application of an FMS is found in the production of small sets of products like those from a mass production.

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