Performance of a Manufacturing Cell with Increased Product Mix

We investigate the impact of increasing the number of items made in a cell on its performance. The optimal lotsizes of production and queuing delays are both shown to increase with increased product mix. However, these adverse effects diminish as more items are assigned to the cell. We also examine a strategy of sequencing which attempts to minimize the number of setups by looking ahead in the queue and processing all items for which the machine is already setup. In the case of similar items, it is found that this sequencing policy results in little savings in setup time.