Agile manufacturing and management of variability

In this study, the relationship between agile manufacturing and management of variability is discussed. First, the key concepts of agility and agile manufacturing are introduced. These key concepts are then related to the management of variability. Previous studies on the modeling of variability of manufacturing systems are reviewed. Then the effects of variability of the structure of the production system, and also the processing time variability on the performance of a manufacturing system are studied by utilizing a simple model of a synchronous production line with identical stations and random processing times. Numerical results that examine the effects of the coefficient of variation of service time and the number of stations on the variability of the cycle time are also given.