There are many production lines which make several products of various
quantities one after another. These lines can be termed as mixed model
production systems. Any operation in a mixed model production line may be a
batch process or a piece-wise process. Process type of the operation and
batch size may even vary with product. Material for any product may move
from one work station to another piece by piece or in terms of batches. Key
performance indices like WIP, order lead times, throughput and on-time
delivery depend on several factors like:
Setup times and cycle times
for each order at each work station Product sequence Batch sizes
(ranging from 1) for orders at work stations Set of resources available
at each work station Multi-functional machines and multi-skilled workers
Available times of resources.
It is not always easy to perform
analysis, planning and scheduling of production in such systems. Many
people use experience, commonsense and intuition to have a qualitative
understanding of the effect of these factors and they use whiteboards or
spreadsheets for production scheduling. Our software tool, Velflow helps
them to analyze the effect of the factors on KPIs and also to generate an
optimal production schedule. Velflow can be used to to implement EPEI
method (Every Part Every Interval) for finding product wheel when demand
for any product does not fluctuate wildly over time. Velflow also enables
users to perform quick and meaningful what-if analysis and identify
bottlenecks in a production line.
We freely offer an academic
version of Velflow which is very useful for training and education on
analysis of production lines. Without giving your contact information, you
can download it by clicking on the button below.
For information about the regular copy, please contact us through our web page,
Contact Us.
Users with date format "dd/mm/yyyy"
(with day first) on their computer have to open the text file
"dateformat.txt" in the installation folder of Velflow and replace the
content with "dd/mm/yyyy" and save the file. Otherwise, the tool will
not work correctly.