Product Variety And Production Quantity Relation In Manufacturing

In general manufacturing facilities, there is a general relation between product variety and production quatity. In this short article, we will explain this relation between these two of concepts in terms of manufacturing. Also you can find lots of articles about manufacturing in Mechanical Base.

Product quantity values are generally classified in three groups;

• Low Production: Production of product quantity ranging from 1 to 100 in a year. Generally this kind of manufacturing processes or facilities includes very complex products such as, ships, aeroplanes etc.
• Medium Production: Production quantity ranges from 100 to 10000 products/year. Car assembly line could be very good example of them.
• High Production: Production quantity ranges  from 10000 to millions of products/year. In these kinds of processes or manufacturing facilities, the produced products are very simple to produce. Serial production manner is valid extremely for these kind of production type.

So it is very basic to classify the production facilities according to their production rates in year. So we can say that there is a strict relationship between the product type and product quantity.

What Is The Relation Between Product Variety And Product Quantity?

Actullay product variety is nor directly means that the end product types that produced by a manufacturing facility or manufacturing process. It is directly related to which kinds of parts are produced in yearly basis in a manufacturing process or facility. So you could think that a production line of aeroplanes. The aeroplane manufactures only 50 aeroplanes/year. Product variety is one actually you can say. But it is not actually like that.

Aeroplane has lots of parts inside them. Some of them produced in other manufacturing facilities and some of them produces in the related manufacturing facility. So all of them assembled in related facility. So there are production of lots of kimds of products in one manufacturing facility which means product variety is very high. But also production quantity is very low. Which fits to above graph.

Also think about a serial production of headlight glasses in a manufacturing site. It is very basic to produce part and there could be some kinds of facilities to produces these basic parts in serial production manner. You can place this kind of manufacturing facility to low product variety/high production quantity.

The general relationship between product variety and production quantity is like that.

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Source of image: Fundamentals Of Modern Manufacturing Book