Quick Response Manufacturing Approach for Lead Time Reduction in PCB Fabrication

In recent years, manufacturing companies have been affected by the economic slump due to the challenge of competition by low-wage countries in the globalized market. This has pushed them to look inward, struggling to find ways to reduce response time, improve quality and cut costs. In this framework, the development of the concept of Quick Response Manufacturing showed that, to compete on speed, industries must change the management mind-set and reduce lead times throughout the organization. The key issue is that a factory’s lead times, work-in-process, and actual capacity are the result of complex dynamics and interactions in the manufacturing system. Thus, to predict whether a decision will improve lead times, it is necessary to be able to forecast both process and queue times, which means that any lead time reduction tool must be able to model these dynamics and interactions. An interesting approach based on established techniques in queuing theory, called Rapid Modelling Technology (RMT), was developed for complex shop floor operations modelling with mathematical equations and fast lead time calculations on a PC; a user-friendly program based on RMT is the MPX© software package. In this paper, the evaluation of human and economic resources of a printed circuit board manufacturing company is analysed through RMT using MPX©.