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Abstract:
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World class textile manufacturers are experiencing a shift away from the once
common commodity goods market. Order requests by customers have shifted to
smaller lot, more frequent orders, with greater product differentiation. In fact, textile
weaving plants once operated as "single product" plants, weaving continuous runs of
single pattern types. These plants manufactured products defined as commodities.
However, during the last five years, weaving plants have moved towards manufacturing
20 to 30 different pattern types with shorter run lengths and with a greater customization
level. As a consequence of this shift, the manufacturing complexity level has increased
significantly with direct effect upon plant productivity performance.
This research studied the factors that affect manufacturing complexity, and it
allowed for the development of a complexity model that relates specific operating
conditions to plant productivity performance within a flat cloth textile weaving
operation. Flat cloth textile weaving was selected because it is most commonly found
in the United States (Hudson, Clapp, & Kness, 1993). A major thrust of this research
has been to identify plant operating conditions that contribute to manufacturing
complexity. Once these conditions were identified, multiple regression models, relating
them, were developed. Specifically, the changes in the operating conditions that
contributed to the level of complexity within the plant were measured against the plant's
labor productivity and weaving efficiency. Results for this research indicate that four of six complexity factors, Product
Variety, Assembly Factor, Product Mix Velocity, and Weave Index, are related to and
effect plant operating performance in terms of labor productivity and machine
efficiency. In addition, multiple attributes were found superior to a single attribute for
measuring Product Variety, Assembly Factor, Product Mix Velocity, and Process
Changeability .
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