Flexible Manufacturing System Problems and Prospect for the Indonesian Automotive Industry

The automotive industry had been one of the pioneers in employing mass production. Dedicated machines and transferline production had been the character of production facilities of this industry.

These production facilities, however, will only be competitive for a large volume of production with efficiency in operation. The Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is a newly developed production system, and is still being developed further. FMS seems to be the future production method for the newly developed automotive industry, characterized by small volume of production and reasonable variety, such as in Indonesia. However many problems will arise in Indonesia for adopting this method of production. This paper discusses these problems and some possible solutions to overcome them.