Applying Operations Research to Scheduling Work Cells in a Manufacturing Environment

Constant competition in the manufacturing sector forces companies to continually decrease their costs while satisfying customer needs. These companies could be more efficient and achieve better results if they automated many of the tasks that they now schedule manually. In this paper, we describe how one department of Johnson Electric, a leading manufacturer of electromechanical components, automated and improved its scheduling process through the application of operations research. We created an easy-to-use Excel Solver-based tool for scheduling self-directed work cells. This tool does not require a user to have any knowledge of mathematical programming, because it automatically adds the objective function and constraints in the background. Our results show that the time required to create schedules decreases drastically and that the quality of the schedules improves significantly depending on the chosen objective function. We illustrate how fundamental knowledge of single-machine scheduling can add significant practical value in manufacturing. Moreover, our work shows that advances in computer interface development tools (e.g., Visual Basic for Applications) are making it possible to efficiently implement operations research concepts.