The effects of disruption on different types of tile manufacturing Industry-layouts: An empirical investigation on tile manufacturing industry

Almost all manufacturing facilities need to use production scheduling systems to increase productivity and reduce production costs. Most manufacturing industries invest huge amount of money to manufacture and supply products on time in order to meet customers demand and objectives but due to unforeseen disruptions, these objectives are difficult to achieve. In Real-life, production operations are subject to a large number of unexpected disruptions that may invalidate an original schedule. This work considered effects of disruption on different types of industry-layouts that are seldom been used in manufacturing industries namely: fixed, product, production and process industry-layouts. Questionnaires were used for data collection from a number of companies in Cameroon and reliably theory, simulation software´s were using to analyze the data. The study reveals that, disruptions varies per industry-layout and the leading sources of disruptions are machine breakdown, power failure, employee´s absenteeism and material shortage. It is concluded that disruption of one type may not greatly affect productivity of a certain industry-layout whilst similar disruptions can have devastating effects on another type and also, the impacts of disruption are dependent on the Industry-layouts.