Methodology improvement in the performance of production systems. Applications in SMEs confection

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for improving the performance of production system in confection SMEs consisting in the use of multicriteria techniques for the selection and prioritization of competing priorities to which the system should  respond,  the  use  of  a  general  procedure  evaluate  the  structural  coherence  of  the  strategy  of  operations  in  terms of competitive priorities, production systems and manufacturing levers, and finally the production system modeling using discrete event simulation in order to experiment improvement alternatives that are aligned with the most important competitive priorities. As a result the proposed methodology was applied to a sample of five SMEs in the manufacturing sector of the city of Manizales in the first stage, finding that the competitive priorities of quality and delivery time are the most relevant. Next to the worst-performing SMEs were applied to the other stages, showing finally the usefulness of the methodology to achieve performance vary their production system in terms of raising an indicator of effectiveness of a value of 2.12 to 2.32 on a scale 0 to 5, to improve its performance by about 10%.