A fresh approach to performance evaluation in a multi-item production scenario

In a truly flexible production environment, it is feasible to interchange the production rate of two items, as long as this does not affect the constraint imposed on total manufacturing time. Performance evaluation in a multi-item production scenario has many facets, and its improvement is possible in many ways. After adopting certain benchmarking or analytical process, usually a facility runs at certain performance level with respect to total system cost. It may be a unique approach to explore the possibility of interchanging the production rate of any item with that of another appropriate item in the group. This is discussed in the present paper with the objective of further improvement in the total cost.