Identification and modelling of the various factors affecting the productivity of FMS

The last few years have witnessed unparalleled changes in the world market and the manufacturing companies have to adjust to these unforeseen changes in the market quickly to survive. So more and more companies are now opting for low volume, high variety flexible manufacturing system (FMS) instead of the conventional mass production. Though FMS provides a lot of strategic and tactical benefits, yet all of these may not be possible with all installations. A manufacturing manager should know what are the specific benefits he is expecting from the FMS installation and what is the time span within which these benefits start coming in. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to accomplish the task of enlisting the factors affecting the productivity of FMS installation and further an attempt has been made to model these different factors using the interpretive structural modelling (ISM). This model is further strengthened using MICMAC analysis by defining the driving power and dependencies of these factors.