A Performance of Cellular and Job Shop Manufacturing Systems Using Simulation-A Case Study

Cellular manufacturing that is based on group technology philosophy and job shop are two different manufacturing systems that are used widely in many firms and factories. Each of them have some characteristics suitable for some factories based on the production types and the policies of those factories. A performance measurement is very essential for each factory to identify the effectiveness of its manufacturing system. There are many techniques and formulas that are used to identify the performance of the manufacturing systems. One of the well-known techniques that used widely for this purpose is the simulation. The current paper used Arena software for simulating both cellular and job shop manufacturing systems separately in State Company for Mechanical Industries which is located in Iraq. After comparison by using some performance factors, cellular manufacturing showed better performance than job shop in terms of the average transfer time with percent of improvement (60.03)%, average total manufacturing time with percent of improvement (15.97)%,, average work in process time with percent of improvement (10.94)%,, schedule utilization with percent of improvement (7.93)%, and the average number of output products with percent of improvement (18.84)%.