The impact of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) on inventories

The purpose of the paper is to summarize the existing evidence on the actual impacts of FMS on inventories, to reveal the relations between inventory reduction and the technical and operational features of FMS, to put forward some hypothesis about the impact of FMS implementation strategies on inventory reduction and, finally, to define the importance of inventory reduction among the various advantages of FMS implementation. The analysis is based on the FMS data bank created at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), which is probably the largest FMS data bank in the world.