Running Head: COMPARISON BETWEEN JOB-SHOP AND FLOW-SHOP 1

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 COMPARISON BETWEEN JOB-SHOP AND FLOW-SHOP 2

There are different approaches to the production lines of commodity industries. Such

approaches include production perspectives such as flow-shop, job-shop, and also most emerging

cell production. The primary functional organization layouts, namely the flow-shop and job-

shop, operates independently in the use of their machinery and also production scale. As such,

the two have very notable disparities ranging from productivity to cost-effectiveness of adopting

any of the approaches. Some of the differences are as follows.

The organizational layout of job-shop allows it to be more flexible by grouping the

machine into a functional section, which helps to meet the market demands by the production of

a variety of products. It is much efficient in dealing with market demand changes due to a wide

range of productivity and flexibility. On the other hand, the flow-job design is structured to

produce a particular product. The structure of the flow-job sets the machines in a linear conveyer

manner, which allows continuous flow towards the production of a specific commodity. The

product orientation of the flow-job allows the production of high-quality products, although it is

faced by market problems when the demand changes since it lacks flexibility. (Sousa and Alves.

2014)

The flexibility of the machinery used in the job-shop allows a multi-purpose production

and also accommodate product customization. On the contrary, the flow-shop machinery

organization confines the organization to one-line commodity production and hard to customize

to meet the market need. The employees of a job-shop have a vast experience as a result of

exposure to different machinery operations, although their productivity per person is relatively

low while in flow-job, the workers are one line experienced as a result of being tied to one

machine at a time. The production per person in flow-shop is relatively high compared to that of

job-shop since it allows specialization and understanding of one’s field of production.

 COMPARISON BETWEEN JOB-SHOP AND FLOW-SHOP 3

The production scale per in flow-shop is relatively low as compared to that of job-shop.

One machine in a flow-shop is entitled to one function, whereas in shop-job, every machine can

operate multi-purposely to meet the timely market requirement. The production scale per

machine makes it an expensive investment for the flow-shop since the organization has to invest

in a vast number of machines while the machine flexibility of a job-shop makes the investment

much effective and efficient for the organization as a result of adaptability to changing market

needs.

From the comparison of job-shop and flow-shop, it is evident that every approach is

advantageous and also has some of the demerits. The adoption of any of the approaches should

be put under thorough examination to identify the effectiveness, for example, in consideration of

the flexibility and production per scale. The choice of the approach is the responsibility of the

management to consider the pros and cons of each, as illustrated in the differences.
 COMPARISON BETWEEN JOB-SHOP AND FLOW-SHOP 4

Reference.

Dinis-Carvalho, J., Alves, A. C., & Sousa, R. M. (2014). Moving from job-shop to production cells

without losing flexibility: a case study from the wooden frames industry. South African Journal of Industrial

Engineering, 25(3), 212-225. Extracted from:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1754/f588e290e92d772d5b4d7b7854c8ba1e51c9.pdf