click on star to go back to Joseph Sarkis' HomepageCellular Manufacturing (CM) is increasing in importance as a philosophy with broad manufacturing applicability. In the recent years, CM has faced criticism by the academic community due to its inferior performance relative to functional layouts (FL). This controversy has led to a lack of consensus among researchers among the appropriate manufacturing environment for CM. Important operational and environmental characteristics that may influence the preference of one system over another include equipment setup and product processing, as well as their ratios. This paper adopts a set of theoretical analytical models to investigate the relative performance of a CM system when compared to an FL system. A large domain of values for setup time and its ratio to processing time per unit help identify a "performance mapping" that may be used as a decision making framework by manufacturing managers. A simple case sudy from a small manufacturing organization helps to evaluate the practical dimensions of the model and study results.
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