Investigating the effects of Job Rotation Schedules on performance of lean cells

Lean cell operates itself by what is called standard operations. Job rotation is known as the standard operation of a lean cell. However, researchers have not studied job rotation to demonstrate the performance of a lean cell. Job rotation decisions affect lean cell performance through influencing the manner in which tasks assigned to the selected operators during several rotation periods. This research studies the lean cell performance as a function of rotation interval, cell factors (size and type) and takt time. The performance targeted in term of 4 different measures. After modeling job rotation scheduling problem and developing an efficient algorithm to find near optimal solutions, data for lean performance against arrangement of factors was gathered by scenarios made based on Taguchi's approach to design of experiments. To analyze the model and impact of factors, ANOVA and MANOVA and interaction analysis were applied. The results shown that the effect of rotation interval and its complex interactions with other factors are statistically significant and some patterns for lean cell performance were obtained.