The existing manufacturing system, which is a typical
job shop, has already been in place and operating for several years. It was considered that conversion to a cellular
manufacturing system could help to improve quality,
eliminate waste, and reduce total manufacturing costs.
First, substantial amount of knowledge were accumulated
under the light of previous studies related with the comparison of functional and group technology (GT) layouts
(e.g. Flynn and Jacobs (1986), Gupta and Leelaket (1993),
Morris and Tersine (1994), and Shafer and Meredith (1993)). As a result, overall understanding of environmental and operational factors that would affect the superiority of cellular manufacturing systems over functional
layout systems was developed.
This study can be considered as a contribution to the
studies in literature summarized by Agarwal and Sarkis
(1998) in the sense that the properties of manufacturing
cells that were constructed in this study are different from
those of a typical manufacturing cell indicated in literature
(e.g. Gaither, Fraizer, and Wei (1990)). The cells designed
and used in this study have the following properties: