We stated in another article that the manufacturing processes can be divided according to their procudtion capacity in year. Some of them produce millions of products in a year, but some of them produce several products in a year basis. In this article we will explain these low quantity product producers or manufacturers. These low quantity manufacturers are generally produce 0 to 100 products in a year. But these facilities has very important features in themself.
This kind of low-quantity manufacturing sites generally called as job-shop. This term explains that there is a specific job that customer demanded from the manufacturer, this is the ‘job’ of the manufacturer now. Also this kind of low-quantity factories or facilities are produce very complex products such as aircraft, special machinery, space capsules etc.
So complex businesses requires complex things. Labor force in these low-quantity manufacturing facilities must be very skilled. Because there is a very complex and constantly changing job. Not like one type serial production manner. So, skilled workforce is required for low-quantity production sites.
And also, very complex product producers generally work in fixed-position layout manner. So there is a big and complex product at the center of the production site, the product is produced in the center, the whole parts are produced in different sections in manufacturing site. All the produced parts come to the center of the low-quantity manufacturing center for the assembly operation.
Consider about the shipyards. In shipyards, the product(ship) is placed on fixed place, then the workforce is working on the product by assembling the parts of the ship according to ship layout. So this is the very good example for, fixed-position layout and job-shop terms.
So the logic of low-quantity production in manufacturing classification can be expressed as this.
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