Competitiveness in today’s market is much more intense compared to the past decades. Considerable resources are invested on facilities planning and re-planning in order to adapt the manufacturing systems to the market changes. A well-established manufacturing philosophy is the group technology concept.
Group technology (GT) can be defined as a manufacturing philosophy identifying similar parts and grouping them together to take advantage of their similarities in manufacturing and design (Selim et al.,1998). It is the basis of so-called cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs). In current production scenario demand for products is characterized by continuous fluctuations in terms of volumes, type of product (part mix), new products introduction and the life cycle of products has significantly reduced. The planning horizon needs to be divided into smaller horizons (time bucket) and the length of each period is related to the characteristics of products. These characteristics need to be considered in design process of a manufacturing system. Introduction of Cellular Manufacturing Systems has already introduced significant improvements. They are conceived with the aim of reducing costs such as setup costs or handling costs and also to reduce lead time and work in process (WIP). They combine advantages of flow shop and job shop, but a further step can be accomplished to be competitive in the market. They allow significant improvements such as: product quality, worker satisfaction, space utilization. Benefits and disadvantages (Irani et al.,1999) are showed in Table 1. They documented that companies implementing cellular manufacturing have a very high probability of obtaining improvements in various areas.