| The Process Flow Add-in provides
a tool to analyze and design manufacturing systems. Four
principal activities are supported as indicated in the
figure above and described in the remainder of this section.
When it is installed, the OM_IE
menu includes the entries shown at the left. The first
two items under Process Flow are used to enter or change
data defining the manufacturing system. Process
Economics performs an analysis to determine the
requirements for resources and raw materials for given
production rates. The Refresh Functions should
be used when opening a model created on a different
computer. All buttons and functions created by the
add-in are replaced by this command.
Process flow analysis assumes
steady-state flow through the system. The principal
abstraction of this model is that it neglects the variability
that is often present in flow systems. It also neglects
the restrictions imposed by scheduling the timing of
production. Still a variety of important questions
can be answered. For a system with a number of products,
resources and raw materials, the analysis can find
the average utilization of resources, identify the
bottleneck resources, estimate raw material requirements
and construct a from-to chart between the physical
resources of the system.
If you do not know how to use
Excel add-ins, be sure to read the instructions before
using this add-in. |
