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Experienced and wise industrial engineering educators and practitioners have long understood that industrial engineering is a coherent discipline encompassing techniques that work best synergistically, not a motley collection of specialized techniques each isolated in a separate chimney. As an example of the synergies which industrial engineering can bring to process improvement in a production environment, this case study presents the integrated use of process simulation, production scheduling, and detailed analysis of material-handling methods and their improvement. The study undertook the identification and improvement of production and scheduling policies to the benefit of a manufacturing process whose original throughput capacity fell significantly short of high and increasing demand. use of simulation results as an input to scheduling and the schedules so generated as a simulation input parameter. The capability of scheduling tools to analyze thousands of alternatives quickly combined with the power of simulation to provide detailed statistical insights into specific scenarios allows these methods to effectively complement each other. This two layer approach is used for the optimal design of manufacturing system fed with robust schedules thus resulting in substantial productivity gains. OVERVIEW OF MANUFACTURING SYSTEM 2.1

The most venerable and the most highly varied general application area in which simulation has frequently and repeatedly proved its economic value is the manufacturing sector of the economy. Manufacturing applications of simulation have included attention to complex issues of equipment and/or worker downtime, problems of facility layout, work and line balancing, bottleneck analysis, and material handling. Furthermore, simulation has proved itself capable of addressing productivity and efficiency improvement tasks in which these complexities overlap and interact. Historically, much of the success simulation has enjoyed in other economic sectors (e.g., service, transportation, and health care) has stemmed in large measure from the reputation it earned in the manufacturing sector. The manufacturing application described in this paper proved the cost-effective feasibility of designing sortation operations downstream of an assembly line, and scheduling SKU pickups there, with no risk of blockage of that line.

This paper describes the application of dynamic simulation to evaluate material handling resource utilization for a stamping plant in the automotive industry. The other objective of this study was evaluation of throughput relative to press schedules, shift patterns, the number of material handling resources (i.e. fork truck and tugger train drivers), and storage inventory levels. This dynamic simulation study enabled plant managers to balance the driver utilization with respect to time and to accommodate typical press schedules to achieve desired throughput levels.