A modelling study of the effects of continuous incremental improvement in the case of a process shop

Today's extremely competitive markets demand that businesses emphasize continuous improvement and/or re-engineering of their current processes. When the various methods for continuous improvement are considered, only setup reduction in the single machine case has received the most attention in the research literature. This study examines the effect of setup reduction and processing time reduction in the case of a multi-product multi-machine job shop. The research was designed to determine whether there are specific shop conditions which favor continuous improvement and examines the impact of these improvements on flexibility. The study also explores the use of the setup time to processing time ratio as an indicator of the effectiveness of further process improvements. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.