A SYSTEM THEORY APPROACH TO THE DESIGN, LAYOUT AND ORGANIZATION OF MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS; CHALLENGES, PRACTICES AND LATERAL THINKING

摘要

The design, layout and organization of manufacturing systems is a complex problem. The aspects interfering with the design of a manufacturing system are many and they are diverse in nature. From a traditional engineering perspective manufacturing system design is about the technical issues of the manufacturing processes. From the business development perspective, the investment in a manufacturing system is a strategic decision that requires foresight. From the business operations perspective, a manufacturing system is about logistics and the ability to deal with market dynamics. From the organization perspective, a manufacturing system design should fit the needs of humans working in the organization with the manufacturing system. From the finance perspective, the manufacturing operation is a cost factor and the machinery and real-estate are values in the balance sheet. There is not a single textbook on the market where these issues are dealt with in a structured, concise way. Even worse, the dominant design paradigms in various sub-disciplines are often conflicting. Simply taking the best of everything will not do. In this paper a system theory based methodology towards manufacturing system and organization design will be presented. This methodology will be compared to the design science paradigm for machine design of Hubka and Eder. A remarkable similarity between both methodologies is that they recognize the importance of organic structuring as a means to minimize the control load. The third part of this paper is dedicated to exploiting this similarity in the area of dealing with the more complex organizational issues of an organization that does: machine design, service design as well as service exploitation.