Factory Physics¶
Hopp, W. J., & Spearman, M. L. (2008). Factory Physics: Foundations of Manufacturing Management. Waveland Press.
Cited by¶
7 citations across 7 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Asymmetric Flux
- One can stabilise the accumulation where the asymmetry is desirable, ensuring capacity to hold what accumulates through thermal ballast, foreign-reserve buffers, or warehouse capacity.
This sourceDevelops the three buffers — inventory, capacity, and time — and how to size a reservoir to absorb variability, the general operations treatment of holding capacity for an accumulating quantity.
- One can stabilise the accumulation where the asymmetry is desirable, ensuring capacity to hold what accumulates through thermal ballast, foreign-reserve buffers, or warehouse capacity.
- Buffering
- Maintained capacity that absorbs perturbation between source and consumer, smoothing variation and decoupling rate mismatches, a structural pattern Hopp and Spearman (2008) place at the center of operations science as the canonical means of buffering against variability.
This sourcePlaces buffering against variability at the center of operations science, identifying inventory, capacity, and time as the three interchangeable buffers a production system uses to absorb demand and process variability.
- Maintained capacity that absorbs perturbation between source and consumer, smoothing variation and decoupling rate mismatches, a structural pattern Hopp and Spearman (2008) place at the center of operations science as the canonical means of buffering against variability.
- Impedance Mismatch and Coupling Efficiency
- The framework compresses domain-specific coupling-efficiency problems into a unified structure: identify subsystems A and B, the quantity being transferred Q, the characteristic impedance (or property) of each subsystem, the loss function (how efficiency depends on mismatch), and the redesign strategy (impedance transformer in electrical systems, synchronization mechanism in organizational systems, schema adapter in software systems), an interface-friction-and-buffering framework Hopp and Spearman (2008) generalize to operations and supply chains in Factory Physics.
This sourceDevelops inventory, capacity, and time as the three buffers that absorb variability in production systems; the five-role decomposition of reserve (resource, nominal demand, surplus, contingency, draw-down) maps directly onto the buffer-against-variability framing.
- The framework compresses domain-specific coupling-efficiency problems into a unified structure: identify subsystems A and B, the quantity being transferred Q, the characteristic impedance (or property) of each subsystem, the loss function (how efficiency depends on mismatch), and the redesign strategy (impedance transformer in electrical systems, synchronization mechanism in organizational systems, schema adapter in software systems), an interface-friction-and-buffering framework Hopp and Spearman (2008) generalize to operations and supply chains in Factory Physics.
- Mediator Availability Constraint
- Engineering bottlenecks (throughput-limiting stations in a production line, bandwidth-limiting routers in a network) are often addressable by parallel redundancy, capital investment, or technical optimization, as Hopp and Spearman (2008) systematize in Factory Physics.
This sourceDevelops inventory, capacity, and time as the three buffers that absorb variability in production systems; the five-role decomposition of reserve (resource, nominal demand, surplus, contingency, draw-down) maps directly onto the buffer-against-variability framing.
- Engineering bottlenecks (throughput-limiting stations in a production line, bandwidth-limiting routers in a network) are often addressable by parallel redundancy, capital investment, or technical optimization, as Hopp and Spearman (2008) systematize in Factory Physics.
- Receptor Saturation
- As Hopp and Spearman (2008) document for distributed-bottleneck behavior in their factory-physics treatment of capacity utilization,
This sourceDevelops inventory, capacity, and time as the three buffers that absorb variability in production systems; the five-role decomposition of reserve (resource, nominal demand, surplus, contingency, draw-down) maps directly onto the buffer-against-variability framing.
- As Hopp and Spearman (2008) document for distributed-bottleneck behavior in their factory-physics treatment of capacity utilization,
- Reserve
- The surplus persists by policy, not by accident; the contingency is named explicitly; the draw-down is conditional on a triggering deviation from the nominal, the same architecture Hopp and Spearman (2008) develop for inventory and capacity buffers in production systems.
This sourceDevelops inventory, capacity, and time as the three buffers that absorb variability in production systems; the five-role decomposition of reserve (resource, nominal demand, surplus, contingency, draw-down) maps directly onto the buffer-against-variability framing.
- The surplus persists by policy, not by accident; the contingency is named explicitly; the draw-down is conditional on a triggering deviation from the nominal, the same architecture Hopp and Spearman (2008) develop for inventory and capacity buffers in production systems.
- Resource Management
- Resource management appears pervasively across systems at every scale, a point Hopp and Spearman (2008) develop in their Factory Physics treatment of capacity, variability, and inventory across manufacturing and service operations.
This sourceDevelops inventory, capacity, and time as the three buffers that absorb variability in production systems; the five-role decomposition of reserve (resource, nominal demand, surplus, contingency, draw-down) maps directly onto the buffer-against-variability framing.
- Resource management appears pervasively across systems at every scale, a point Hopp and Spearman (2008) develop in their Factory Physics treatment of capacity, variability, and inventory across manufacturing and service operations.
Verification¶
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