Identifying potential bottlenecks through activity under-utilization cost

Abstract

Due to the increased emphasis on technology, modern manufacturing processes are no longer labor intensive. Therefore, the traditional cost estimation approaches based on volumetric measures are inadequate to asses the costs accurately. Contemporary approaches such as activity based costing have been suggested that track hidden costs by relating them to the specific activities, thus providing a much more realistic estimation for manufacturing costs. Since activity based costing does not assign cost of under-utilized resources to customers, the issue of resource under-utilization remains unaddressed. The present paper recognizes resource under-utilization cost to be an important consideration in order to identify the potential bottlenecks in the manufacturing process. This paper proposes an activity based costing model to identify resource under-utilization assuming normally distributed demand. In light of futuristic uncertainty about order sizes and in order to validate the proposed model, a discrete-event simulation approach has been presented.

Extended DCSP Approach on Product Configuration with Cost Estimation

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Fully-Automated Liquid Penetrant Inspection Line Simulation Model for Increasing Productivity

“…Flow concentrators also generate underutilization of the structural elements of the inspection system leading to financial loss [11]. Thus, as main novelty of the research, the data obtained from the simulation of the LPI system functioning with the optimal configuration is used for generating commands for different equipment such as buffers and nozzles for spraying penetrant liquid, water and developer, as it will be presented at the end of section 4 of the present study.…”

Optimal Tolerance Allocation in a Complex Assembly Using Evolutionary Algorithms

“…Cheng and Tsai [24,25] solved allocation of statistical tolerances with exponential cost function and obtained closed-form solution of optimal tolerances. Gill [26] considered a manufacturing cost as important for the manufacturing processes using activity based cost model. Lestan et al [27] have proposed the evolutionary optimization techniques, considered to be a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to measure the scheduling efficiency.…”