Balancing Workers in Divisional Serus

Abstract

In the last decades, Seru Production Systems (SPSs) are introduced to face short product life cycle and high demand volatility, rising as a new cellular production pattern and a relevant alternative to lean systems. SPS is a particular class of cellular system in which the manufacturing cells are reconfigurable rather than fixed and they can be efficiently used for assembly, packaging and testing operations rather than fabrication alone. A particular class of seru is the divisional, staffed with several partially cross-trained workers. This paper proposes a quantitative model and simulation to balance workers in divisional serus. Results highlight that the working time of the operators is well balanced among them. In addition, a multi-scenario analysis, varying the number of operators, shows that the productivity of the system increases by decreasing the number of operators. Such a result follows the working mode of SPSs, in which the number of operators is progressively reduced, i.e. the most experienced (faster) operators are removed as long as just one operator is in the seru. This philosophy is justified by the assumption that the operators, as they work into the system, acquire competence and become faster.