Critical activities in a successful cellular manufacturing implementation

A manufacturing cell consists of a cluster of functionally dissimilar machines or processes which are placed in close proximity to one another and are dedicated to the manufacture of a set of part families. Parts are grouped into part families depending on the similarity in parts´ geometry, manufacturing processes required, or both. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the data collected in a survey of US firms that operate manufacturing cells. The objective was to identify several activities as variables describing the major implementation process. The ultimate goal was to determine which activities have greatest impacts on the degree of success. Best subsets of the variables (the ones which have the most impact on CM success) were generated using exploratory descriptive (rather than predictive) regression models. The results may provide a preliminary identification of `best practices´ for CM implementation