APPLICATION OF GROUP TECHNOLOGY FOR PRODUCTION TIME ESTIMATION

The development of industry, transport, communications and technology results in tougher competition, i.e. the process of globalization takes place. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which are greatly affected by this process, are expected to accept or to refuse the received offer in a very short period of time. Consequently, it is impossible for a small enterprise to create a technological process in order to calculate production times. The idea of the authors of this paper is to develop a system of part classification by means of group technologies. The classifier is used to classify parts into similar groups. So, if we have a new part, we can find a similar part and adopt its technological process to the new part. In the next step, an application to enable the production time estimation, and consequently the production cost estimation for each family of parts will be developed.