Generic simulation

There is considerable pressure on British manufacturing organisations to improve on their company´s order winning criteria in a highly competitive, world-wide market. This leads to demands being made which often conflict with each other. A common problem facing management is how to determine the effect of different manufacturing layouts and philosophies on criteria such as resource utilisation, lead-times and work-in-progress. Computer based simulation packages appear to offer a way to dynamically analyse many complex problems in manufacturing but they are used infrequently due to a lack of personnel skilled in their language and construction. This paper presents an animated generic model produced using SIMAN and MENUGEN suites which can be used by the manufacturing team. This program allows them, without re-programming, to see the effect of differences in variables such as product mix layouts, batch sizes, available resources and improvements in processing and quality