• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.81-99
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• 2004

Manufacturing flexibility has strategic position in improving competitive advantage as a mechanism that responses environmental uncertainty. Thus this study aims at recognizing strategic meaning of manufacturing flexibility in enhancing the competitive advantage and measuring manufacturing flexibility and ultimately analyzing the effects of IT use on the manufacturing flexibility. Consequently we proved that IT use have an effect on manufacturing flexibility and manufacturing flexibility has an effect on competitive advantage in this study The results of this study are as follows. First, information acquisition and decision support by IT use has a significant effect on enhancing the manufacturing flexibility and manufacturing flexibility has a significant effect on improving the competitive advantage. Theses results are also means that IT use to support AMT usage is more important than AMT itself in the achieving manufacturing flexibility.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.52-58
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• 2004

This report examines the issue of designing an efficient production system by increasing several types of flexibility. Increasing manufacturing flexibility is a key strategy for efficiently improving market responsiveness in the face of uncertain market demand for final products. The manufacturing system comprises multiple plants, of which individual plants have multiple manufacturing lines that are designed to produce limited types of products in accordance with their size and materials. Imbalance in the workload occurs among plants as well as among manufacturing lines because of fluctuations in market demand for final products. Thereby, idleness of some manufacturing lines and longer lead times in some manufacturing lines occur as a result of the high workload. We clarify how these types of flexibility affect manufacturing performance by improving only one type of flexibility or by improving multiple types of flexibility simultaneously. The average lead time and the imbalance in workload are adopted as measures of manufacturing performance. Three types of manufacturing flexibility are interrelated: machine flexibility, routing flexibility, and process flexibility. Machine flexibility refers to the various types of operations that a machine can perform without requiring the prohibitive effort of switching from one order to another. Routing flexibility is the capability of processing a given set of part types using more than one line (alternative line) in the plant. Process flexibility results from being able to build different types of final products at the same plant.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.137-156
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• 1999

Flexibility is a competitive weapon in the changing environment. In order to pursue the flexibility, Korean manufacturing companies must define the flexibility dimension clearly, build the appropriate manufacturing infrastructures and measure the right flexibility performance indicators. This paper found out as follows. First, Korean manufacturing companies' flexibility strategy groups were formed three types. They are flexibility superior group, middle flexibility group and flexibility inferior group. Second, when different types of flexibility strategy group measured their performances, the degree of importance of flexibility performance indicators were different among groups. Third, when different types of flexibility strategy group were pursued, the different manufacturing methods such as product/process design technology, analysis technology, production system management technology and non technological factors were used. Lastly, when different types of flexibility strategy group were pursued, the actual flexibility performances were different among groups.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.236-247
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• 2015

This study aims to examine the effects of industrial clustering and manufacturing flexibility on innovation capability and operational performance. This study follow a survey method to collect data pertaining to the phenomena of industrial clustering, manufacturing flexibility, innovation capability, and operational performance by utilizing a single respondent design. A total of 124 Indonesian manufacturing SMEs are taken to test the proposed theoretical model by utilizing covariance-based structural equations modeling approach. It was found that both industrial clustering and manufacturing flexibility was positively associated with operational performance and innovation capability as well. In addition, innovation capability may account for the effects of industrial clustering and manufacturing flexibility on operational performance. This implies that manufacturing SMEs have to reorient their production and operation perspectives, including agglomerate with other similar or related SMEs to develop and utilize their own resources. The SMEs also need to possess some degree of manufacturing flexibility in respond to the uncertain environment and market changes. In addition, the SMEs should put a greater emphasize to use industrial cluster and manufacturing flexibility benefits to generate innovation capability to achieve high performance.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.14 no.24
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• pp.155-161
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• 1991

Flexibility has become a key objectives in the design of manufacturing systems and a critical measure of total manufacturing performance. The need for flexibility is increasing due to some environmental change such as changing technical characteristics of the products and the changing nature of market demands. Most importantly, flexibility embodies competitive value for a manufacturer. Although the importance of flexibility has stressed in the various research, very few attempts have been made to synthesize the literature dealing with definitions and measure of flexibility. It is this issue that have motivated us to search for the definition and classification of flexibility.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.91-102
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• 1993

This paper suggests an approach to quantitative evaluation of a manufacturing flexibility in automated manufacturing systems. The flexibility of a cell is newly defined and evaluated in use of the environmental change factors which may influence flexibility for satisfying a manufacturing performance objective. The number of machines, the number of operations, machine breakdowns and processing times are considered for this cell flexibility measure. The cell flexibility measures the extent that the cell utilizes the processes to acquire high throughput. Simulation program written in SLAM System was used to help measure cell flexibility. The proposed cell flexibility measure provides a prediction of the influence of the factors on throughput performance, and applies in case of comparison of existing system and a new system, changes in operation conditions of a cell, and comparison of rival machines. Therefore it can be used as decision making criteria for system justification.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.251-262
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• 1999

In the automated manufacturing systems, the problem regarding how to make production activities flexible is even more important and critical than that regarding how to product large quantities, and the more flexible, if possible, the manufacturing system is, the more competitiveness and profitable factors it gets. This research, therefore, concentrated on establishing the flexibility and evaluating performance on the manufacturing system, operational flexibility is considered because of enabling the manufacturing system to get both the improvement of production rate and the adaptive ability of environment changes. For it, we used the analytical tool, GSPNs, which is a kind of timed Petri-Nets. GSPNs is competent enough to consider practical situations just like operation priorities, machine failure, randomness, concurrency and so on. Through the GSPNs analysis, it is confirmed that in the manufacturing system with operational flexibility is compatible with the traditional performances such as production rate or mean waiting time.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.20 no.43
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• pp.277-285
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• 1997

In this paper, the definition to flexibility is examined through the literature and re-classified to set up an evaluation model. Flexibility is classified into three categories to find the flexibility types for evaluation. The flexibility type called as manufacturing flexibility is defined and a model is developed to make the performance evaluation possible, The manufacturing flexibility has a heavy relationship to the machine flexibility; and 5 flexibility types out of 8 have relationship to the machine flexibility. This indicates that it is possible to have a pretty good evaluation measure if the machine flexibility related types could be evaluated using a model. There are four different inter-arrival times in the model. A big time saving is observed if the processing time is set equal to 72 second. This indicates that a flexibility affects the system a lot if the inter-arrival time is close to the processing time. The model used in this paper includes multi-processes in a production line with machine failure. However, development of realistic models with buffer between processes and some of the flexibility types not included in this model are remained for further research.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.200-203
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• 1997

Bacteria isolated from ultrapure water made by a high-purity water manufacturing system in a semiconductor manufacturing plant were classified into two groups which either grew in diluted nutrient broth medium (oligotrophic bacteria) or could not grow (copiotrophic bacteria). The nutritional flexibility of oligotrophic and copiotrophic bacteria was investigated. The oligotrophic bacteria were shown to be able to utilize a significantly broader range of organic substrates than the copiotrophic bateria. This finding substantiates the hypothesis that nutritional flexibility is adaptive for oligotrophic bacteria.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.22 no.51
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• pp.63-72
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• 1999

Many firms have applied flexible manufacturing systems as a means of increasing productivity, profitability, and quality. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop the more efficient justification model through an analytical scoring model with the quantitative factors, flexibility factors, and safety factors under uncertainty. In this paper, the three factors for properly comparing and evaluating of flexible manufacturing systems are presented. Especially, this paper has emphasized the flexibility and safety factor; the one consists of organization assessment, process treatment function, products and products quantity, useful life assesment, and software function, the other presents risk assesment, Y2K problem, safety device analysis, total productive management system, safety management. Finally, a normalized scoring model by the new flexibility and safety factors can be used in real fields for flexible manufacturing systems project selection under uncertainty.