"Lean Manufacturing: Designing the Cell"

Steve Hunter

FDM

October 2003, pp. 26-29

This article provides a short introduction to designing manufacturing cells. Some of the key points of the article are:

• Cells should be designed around similar products that define a sequence of processes.
• Cells may be all manual operations, part manual and part machine processing, all machining or even all robotic. Most cells are part manual and part processing.
• Cells are often arranged into a U-shape, but they have also been designed into different arrays.
• The Lean Production system is made of manufacturing and subassembly cells and final assembly, linked by a pull kanban system that holds and physically controls in-process inventory between cells.
• Involve cell operators in the early stage of designing the cell. Otherwise, they may not take ownership of the operation.
• Machines and processes in a cell are usually single-cycle automatics that complete the desired processing untended and then turn themselves off automatically after the processing cycle.
• Normally, in assembly or sub-assembly and in some labor-intensive machining cells, the worker moves from process to process or workstation to workstation completing each step of the assembly process.
• All the cells in the plant are designed to produce parts as needed, when needed, by the downstream processes and assembly lines.
• Piece parts are fabricated by the cells and flow lines at the rate needed in accordance with the system takt time.

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