Economic efficiency of manufacturing technology integration

• Manufacturing technology integration is a manufacturing system design paradigm.
• Evaluation of paradigm with regards to productivity, cost and throughput time.
• Manuf. tech. integration is particularly cost -efficient for low output quantities.
• Throughput times are not necessarily shorter in integrated system.

Manufacturing technology integration is an emerging paradigm that focuses on the functional integration of diverse manufacturing technologies into machine tools. This paper describes the application of models of production, cost, and queuing theory to identify conditions under which manufacturing technology integration yields greater productivity, lower cost, and decreased throughput times than a manufacturing system comprising conventional single-technology machine tools. It was found that manufacturing technology integration is particularly cost- efficient for small output quantities. However, although the logistic chain is shortened through manufacturing technology integration, throughput times might increase because of waiting times.