Analytic model to predict productivity in divisional Seru production environment

Advanced production environments emerged as the good solution to address the modern market challenges asking for a wide product mix and low time to market. Within cellular systems, made of independent, modular and flexible working areas, tailored on families of similar products, Serus are of increasing adoption for both manufacturing and assembly tasks. Among them, the so-called divisional Serus are the first step to move from the traditional production lines to a production environment made of a set of identical working areas, parallelising activities and enabling potential productivity increase. Despite their adoption in industry, starting from the electronic sector and moving forward, reference analytic models to predict divisional Seru productivity are rare in the literature, while their formulation and application is a gap to fill. This paper addresses this gap in theory, supporting the transition toward Seru production environment by proposing and proofing the analytic closed-form expressions getting the expected productivity of a divisional Seru made of a generic number of workers and a) one (base case), b) two (extension) and c) a generic number (general case) of product types to produce. Together with the steps to get the productivity expressions for these three cases of immediate practical applicability and not yet proposed by the literature, a case study and sensitivity analysis on the divisional Seru dimension showcase the proposed model industrial use and impact on the expected productivity. Key results highlight a stationary behaviour of the working time for all workers making the Seru productivity dependent on the sum of the workers speed and the product type workloads.