Part-family formation for cellular manufacturing: a case study at Harnischfeger

In this paper, a procedure for part-family formation in a manufacturing situation with high part variety is discussed, a new similarity coefficient based on batch size is introduced, and a case study at Harnischfeger is reviewed. The component variety at Harnischfeger is in hundred thousands of parts, and poses a problem for the traditional methods of gathering data for machine-part matrices. The development of a procedure for dealing with this problem has been a part of this work as well as a step-by-step refinement of he final block-diagonal machine-part matrix for adaptation to the specific requirements of the manufacturing system at Harnischfeger.