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Operations and Supply Chain Management Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Operations and Supply Chain Management
Performance Of Cellular Bucket Brigades With Hand-Off Times, Yun Fong Lim
Performance Of Cellular Bucket Brigades With Hand-Off Times, Yun Fong Lim
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
A cellular bucket brigade is a way to coordinate workers along an aisle with work content on both sides. Each worker in a cellular bucket brigade works on one side of the aisle when he proceeds in one direction, and he works on the other side when he proceeds in the reverse direction. Although the cellular bucket brigade eliminates the unproductive walk-back, it requires more hand-offs to assemble a product than a traditional (serial) bucket brigade. These hand-offs may waste significant production capacity as each of them requires an exchange of work, which can be complicated and time-consuming in practice. …
Self-Organizing Logistics Systems, John J. Bartholdi, Iii, Donald D. Eisenstein, Yun Fong Lim
Self-Organizing Logistics Systems, John J. Bartholdi, Iii, Donald D. Eisenstein, Yun Fong Lim
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
When a logistics system is “self-organizing” it can function without significant intervention by managers, engineers, or software control. The social insects, such as ants or bees, provide models of self-organizing logistics systems that may be profitably emulated. We illustrate some of these ideas for the problem of balancing assembly lines.
Maximizing Throughput Of Bucket Brigades On Discrete Work Stations, Yun Fong Lim, Kum Khiong Yang
Maximizing Throughput Of Bucket Brigades On Discrete Work Stations, Yun Fong Lim, Kum Khiong Yang
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
One way to coordinate workers along an assembly line that has fewer workers than work stations is to form a bucket brigade. The throughput of a bucket brigade on discrete work stations may be compromised due to blocking even if workers are sequenced from slowest to fastest. For a given work distribution on the stations we find policies that maximize the throughput of the line. When workers have very different production rates, fully cross-training the workers and sequencing them from slowest to fastest is almost always the best policy. This policy outperforms other policies for most work distributions except for …