Quantifying the influence of FMS on the productivity of a firm

The manufacturing organisations adopt flexible manufacturing systems to meet the challenges imposed by today's volatile market standards. An FMS is designed to combine the efficiency of a mass production line and the flexibility of a job shop to produce a variety of products on a group of machines. Productivity is a key factor in a flexible manufacturing system performance. Despite the advantages offered, the implementation of FMS has not been very popular especially in developing countries as it is very difficult to quantify the factors favouring FMS implementation. For its successful implementation, technological considerations, cost justification as well as strategic benefits are to be weighted. Therefore an attempt has been made in the present work to identify and categorise various productivity factors influenced by the implementation of FMS in a firm, further these factors are quantitatively analysed to find their inhibiting strength using graph theoretic approach (GTA). GTA is a powerful approach which synthesises the inter-relationship among different variables or subsystems and provides a synthetic score for the entire system. So using this approach a numerical index is proposed in this work to evaluate and rank the various productivity factors so that the practising managers can have better focus.