What is “Flexible manufacturing” from a Concurrent Engineering point of view?
The accountant-driven manufacturing enterprise controls its employees to focus their attention on rates of output, rather than on flexibility of resource inputs, or quality of output. The reasons are obvious. Most accountants focus on accounting for existing wealth, rather than creating new wealth, they are trying to spread the high overhead costs on an ever-increasing number of batches. This often leads to the systematic creation of unsold stock, in other words waste. Small and large manufacturing companies have found that designing and making goods and products “to order” rather than “for stock”, is the key issue in cutting manufacturing costs and lead times, and satisfying the rapidly changing customer requirements. Flexible manufacturing offers the fabrication (i.e. machining, assembly, test, painting, welding, packaging and other) facilities and technologies for this “to order” versus “for stock” CIM concept. FMS (Flexible Manufacturing System) may be defined as a re-programmable
