Efficiency and Economic Evaluation of Cellular Manufacturing to Enable Lean Machining

The ideas of Group Technology and Cellular Manufacturing have been a research topic for decades. Although widely implemented in assembly, the principles of flow production as central element of Lean Production have not often been transferred successfully to machining areas yet. In times of continuously rising hardware complexity Cellular Manufacturing is an alternative approach to enable both, flow production and volume flexibility in machining, but can rarely be found in Europe. Current research activities focus on identifying relevant performance indicators to evaluate economic fields of application of Cellular Manufacturing using the example of milling.