An implementation of cellular manufacturing system to reduce order lead times at Tepe Furniture Company

The main objective of this study is the implementation of a cellular manufacturing system to reduce the customer order lead times at Tepe Furniture. We first developed a mathematical model for the worker allocation problem and used this model to find the optimum number of cells in order to reduce the variability of worker skill levels in and between the manufacturing cells. We implemented the proposed solution approach in a pilot cell and showed that the order lead times could be reduced by 14.5% or 8.29% for the customer orders from Istanbul and Ankara regions, respectively. Due to the existing management practices, customer orders from Istanbul region have a higher priority compared to the other customer orders. We also designed a web-based system to monitor the customer orders throughout the system. This web-based system could be used to schedule the customer orders at each production stage and to provide a timely information to the decision makers.