The Trade off between Efficiency and Buffer Size for Cycled Machines

The target of any company is to make money, thus in an operational environment there are several initiatives to increase equipment efficiency (productivity) and decrease buffers size (inventory costs) as major contributors to the company financial bottom line.

The problem is that these two initiatives are interconnected and have opposite effects. In other words, the actions to increase efficiency such as lower number of setups and higher batch size will also increase the in process inventory.

This paper will describe the analytical model that Visteon Brazil used to optimize machine efficiency and buffer size.