The Process Flow Add-in provides a tool
to analyze and design manufacturing systems. Four principal activities
are supported as indicated in the figure above and described in
the remainder of this section.
When it is installed, the OM_IE menu
includes the entries shown at the left. The first two items
under Process Flow are used to enter or change data defining
the manufacturing system. Process Economics performs
an analysis to determine the requirements for resources and
raw materials for given production rates. The Refresh Functions
should be used when opening a model created on a different computer.
All buttons and functions created by the add-in are replaced
by this command.
Process flow analysis assumes steady-state
flow through the system. The principal abstraction of this model
is that it neglects the variability that is often present in
flow systems. It also neglects the restrictions imposed by scheduling
the timing of production. Still a variety of important questions
can be answered. For a system with a number of products, resources
and raw materials, the analysis can find the average utilization
of resources, identify the bottleneck resources, estimate raw
material requirements and construct a from-to chart between
the physical resources of the system.
If you do not know how to use Excel add-ins,
be sure to read the instructions
before using this add-in. |