Make it Specialized or Flexible?

Abstract

Throughput time, the time duration from customer arrival to service completion, is strategically important. In this paper, we consider flexibility as a way to reduce mean throughput time. In case where manufacturing or service systems are modelled as queueing systems, we derive substantial decrease in mean throughput time by incorporating flexibility. We study two types of flexible systems: a parallel flexible system and a serial flexible system. In a case of this paper, the mean throuthput time is reduced to less than a half via flexibility. Thus we can choose flexibility as an alternative for specialization which has been a conventional way to improve production effciency. The result in this paper should be helpful to the practitioners(both in man ufacturing and service sectors) who try to shorten the response time to customers and gain competitive edge. By making servers more flexible, they can reduce mean throughput time since the flexible servers can help each other and sequencing priority can sometimes be applied appropriately.