Implications Of Group Technology

The concept of group technology (GT) is drawing increasing interest from manufacturing industry for its potential to enhance productivity and efficiency. This paper identifies the major areas of manufacturing and operations management where GT can be of significance. GT may have a sizable impact inparts design, by standardizing the design and eliminating redundancies. Computer‐aided process planning together with GT can vastly improve the productivity of process designers and also simplify the design. The benefits derived from GT in the area of production planning and control are reduced queue time, smaller lot‐sizes, less work‐in‐process, better scheduling and so on. The limitations of GT are the relative lack of experience with GT and the initial cost of change‐over to GT. It is suggested that implementations of GT should be a slow gradual shift rather than a sudden change of functional lay‐out.