The Management of Complexity in Manufacturing

This Report highlights why complexity is now a critically important challenge for all manufacturing organizations. It explains exactly what complexity is, and how it has developed into a strategic business issue. Learn how complexity has helped shape successful manufacturing operations, and how recognition of its role has allowed leading companies to target key markets more accurately and rationalize their product range. The report provides a comprehensive route map to different types of complexity and describes a range of different tools and methodologies with which to handle each challenge
successfully.

Chapter 1: Setting the Scene
This chapter underlines the strategic importance of complexity for manufacturing companies in order to satisfy customers they try to produce broader product ranges and yet control costs.

Chapter 2: Understanding Complexity
Complexity has always been part of manufacturing and has been dealt with in various forms over the years from Ford onwards. By viewing these experiences alongside recent academic studies, the reader gains an understanding of complexity as 'uncertainty caused by the presence of variety'.

Chapter 3: Complexity as a Strategic Issue
This chapter brings complexity into the present , underlines the importance of treating it as a strategic issue and discusses different strategies and methods for its managing and measuring, such as the Puttock Grid.

Chapter 4: Simplifying the Manufacturing Structure - Designing out Complexity
The first chapters looked at different ways of dealing with complexity.
This one puts forward the solution of simplifying the structure through good design, so that new products should only be designed by keeping in mind how they will be produced.

Chapter 5: Pruning Existing Structures
Most companies cannot afford to design from scratch; they have to make the best of what they have. Hence, this second solution to complexity - simplifying what exists and finding cures for existing ills.

Chapter 6: The Complexity of an Operation
The central chapter of the report it brings together the two major sources of complexity, structural and operational. Simplification, better management through tighter control and due-date performance are the proposed solutions.

Chapter 7: Disturbances
Disturbances are the most disruptive element in the manufacturing process. This chapter classifies disturbances and goes on to look at preventative measures, such as Total Productive Maintenance (TPM).

Chapter 8: Controlling the Complex Plant
Control through scheduling is the fourth option for dealing with internal complexity. How to produce feasible schedules and the role of commercial packages is discussed in this context.

Chapter 9: The Supply Chain
A factory has many parallels with a supply chain. This chapter explores the options to improve the working of the supply chain, the whole issue of make or buy and the role and principles of partnership.

Chapter 10: The Cost of Complexity
Complexity generates costs. No accepted method of calculating costs fully applies to the costs of complexity, so this chapter reviews the most appropriate accounting methods and approaches that can be used, such as the Cost Complexity Matrix.

Chapter 11: Emerging Concepts
This final chapter looks at the ways in which advanced technologies will further influence a sector already heavily reliant on technology. In particular, the role of agents and how the linking of these can lead to a distribution of complexity.