Cells and Flexible Automation: A History and Synergistic Application

Flexible manufacturing equipment is the technological union of computer integration and machine tools. Flexible manufacturing is commonly understood as offering certain types of ‘flexibility’ for manufacturers to mitigate or manage the significant uncertainty they may encounter. For example, with this investment they are better able to respond to customers’ needs and desires in product design, product availability, and adaptation for successive design of part types. Such promises have resulted in widespread investment in these technologies in industry and significant investment in research in academia. The competitive pressures in global manufacturing markets, primarily during the 1980’s, drove companies to improve product quality and ‘flexibility’ without sacrificing operational cost reductions already achieved in many industries. The use of flexible automation was suggested as one way to answer these pressures, even though these new technologies were more expensive. However, it soon became clear that mere capital investment was insufficient to satisfy these challenges: significant technical and managerial issues needed to be resolved before the full benefits of these technologies could be attained.