Developing flexibility in assembly environments

Manufacturing flexibility has been a topic of interest for both researchers and practitioners for several decades. Despite the amount of attention that flexibility receives, it remains a nebulous concept to those in industry trying to develop flexibility within their firms. This thesis attempts to act as a guide to practitioners, bridging the gap between the idealistic academic literature and the pragmatic concerns that are encountered when actually implementing flexibility projects. It is very difficult to develop recommendations for the implementation of flexibility projects from outside of an organization. Therefore this thesis introduces two separate flexibility implementation case studies that were performed while the author was employed by the firm in the case study. Through offering this unique perspective, it becomes apparent that without knowing the cultural and political climate of the firm, poor recommendations can be made. Often implementation failure can be traced back to this root cause. Flexibility is often thought of as a manufacturing problem. While flexibility is an important tool in combating increased uncertainty and variability within the manufacturing environment, there is great opportunity to utilize flexibility in other environments as well.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Dolak, Eric J

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Hardt and Jeremie Gallien.

• Mechanical Engineering.
• Sloan School of Management.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39727

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39727