Reinforcement of performance competitiveness by concurrent strategy

Due to the recent globalization of industrial activities and diversification of consumer's interest on products and services, companies can not avoid to reinforcing their performance, e.g. efforts on complaint elimination as quality issue (Q), financial effectiveness as cost issue (C), lead time reduction as delivery issue (D) and capability enhancement as flexibility issue (F) etc. Among these, lead time reduction, which forms an aspect of company's agility, is an emerging topic to provide quick response on customer needs. Concurrent technology is one relevant way of approach that brings us along with this direction. In this paper, several concurrent technology case applications are investigated and some key concepts embedded in these are categorized for essential understanding of this technology. These concepts in relation to three major production resources, i.e. human, machine and material, are overlapping manual operations as worker operation concurrency, overlapping automated operations as machine operation concurrency and small lot (batch) flow as material flow concurrency respectively. To evaluate the relevancy of these concepts, performance improvement case study is carried out at a chemical product manufacturing line and the result suggests that proper combinatorial installation of these concepts is an effective way for getting competitive performance on manufacturing/service lead time.