Simulation as an intuition building tool for factory physics

Abstract

In today's manufacturing environment it is absolutely critical to be competitive in order to guarantee a company's sustainability. One way to achieve this sustainability is to count on management's ability to effectively make decisions dealing with its manufacturing resources. To do this management must rely on a systematic description of the manufacturing system and a set of performance measures used to evaluate and control the system. One way to do this is to employ the concepts and laws of Factory Physics. These concepts and laws can become very powerful tools to identify and understand a system's weak points, permitting management to design ways to turn them into leverage points. But to do this management needs to have good intuition and this can only be done if it fully understands the meaning of these concepts and laws. In order to facilitate the understanding of Factory Physics a computer based simulation model was developed as part of a learning tool to be used in conjunction with a formal Factory Physics course. This paper examines the model and its usefulness as a learning tool.