Title: Improving the electronics manufacturing response in an assembly-to-order environment

Authors: Petri T. Helo, Olli-Pekka K. Hilmola

Addresses: Wapice Ltd., Wolffintie 36 F 2, FIN-65350 Vaasa, Finland. Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, International Business (Logistics), Rehtorinpellonkatu 3, FIN-20500 Turku, Finland

Abstract: Manufacturing of electronics products requires high quality and rapid response for customer satisfaction and business profitability. In this paper, the authors propose a queuing theory based method for improving the response measured as order lead time. In the literature, models have illustrated well the trade-off between capacity utilisation and lead time. The results show the possibilities of defining lot sizes as time-based variables. This reduces the variation in service rate and helps in forecasting the actual available-to-promise capability of a production system. The practical applicability of the approximation is discussed as well improvements for further research.

Keywords: queuing models; theory of constraints; TOC; electronics manufacturing; lot sizes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMTM.2003.003461

International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 2003 Vol.5 No.4, pp.362 - 370

Published online: 09 Sep 2003 *

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