With the world scale industrialization, now the capacity to produce and export manufactured goods is being dispersed in different countries. The market share of the buyer-driven commodity chains cannot be captured by producing large volume of product efficiently anymore, yet their advantages are gained on the ability to handle small volume and high product proliferation order. The flexible manufacturing system is particularly important to handle these orders and flexible material handling system is one of its important components....[ Read more ]

With the world scale industrialization, now the capacity to produce and export manufactured goods is being dispersed in different countries. The market share of the buyer-driven commodity chains cannot be captured by producing large volume of product efficiently anymore, yet their advantages are gained on the ability to handle small volume and high product proliferation order. The flexible manufacturing system is particularly important to handle these orders and flexible material handling system is one of its important components.

In this study, a proposed material handling system by Dr. Neville K.S. Lee is evaluated by comparing it with ETON, a Unit Production System has been developed over 35 years and designed for textile manufacturing. The HKUST Proposed System has better performance in terms of responsiveness, space utilization, material flow distance and reliability.