Manufacturing System Performance Analysis:
History and Prospects
by
John A. Buzacott, Ph.D.
Schulich School of Business
York University
Wednesday, October 3, 2001
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Room 108 ME
Broadcast on UNITE Channel A
Coffee and cookies will be available in 152 ME following the seminar
This talk has three components. The first component
traces the evolution of manufacturing system performance analysis
over the last sixty-odd years. The focus will be on performance
analysis that attempts to understand the impact of variability,
uncertainty and disturbances. The emphasis will be on the way
in which technological innovations and managers' awareness of
new manufacturing challenges interacted with the development of
new modeling methods. Major advances in performance modeling tend
to come from recognizing that some situation is capable of mathematical
modeling, and recognizing the value of simple models in providing
initial insight and developing intuition.
The second component of the talk is the assessment of the practical
relevance and usefulness of the approaches that have been developed.
Technological development has created new challenges and opportunities
and enabled manufacturing systems to be organized in different
ways. While models ought to identify the challenges and opportunities
before managers are aware of them they have usually failed to
do so. Manufacturing system performance analysis also has to be
put in wider contexts such as supply chains, investments, production
and inventory management, or service systems. It appears that
academic interest in these areas follows cycles, fads, or bandwagons,
so it is of interest to ask where manufacturing performance analysis
in this bandwagon cycle and thus comment on the likelihood of
major research activity in the near future.
The last component is to try and make some predictions about how
performance analysis is likely to evolve in the future. Any attempt
at understanding how performance analysis will evolve requires
thinking about how manufacturing will evolve. Also, our understanding
of what issues are capable of being represented by models also
changes with time. Models typically become more and more complex,
and only rarely is it possible to develop a precise approach that
dramatically simplifies the representation of complexity. So the
talk ends with the caveat that any attempt at predicting the future
is bound to be proved wrong by the occurrence of one or more such
developments.
John Buzacott was born in Sydney, Australia. He graduated from
the University of Sydney with First Class Honours in Electrical
Engineering in 1959. He then worked and studied in the UK, obtaining
an M.Sc. in Operational Research and a Ph.D. in Engineering Production
from the University of Birmingham. He moved to Canada and has
taught at the Universities of Toronto, Waterloo and York. He is
the co-author of two books and the author of about 80 publications
in scientific journals. In April 2001 he was awarded the degree
of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Technical University of Eindhoven
in the Netherlands.
Informal Faculty Luncheon: Wednesday,
October 3, 2001, 12:00 noon Prof. Buzacott will be able to attend.
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