2. Comprehension check.

Working in pairs, answer the questions.

1. What is batch production?

2. Explain briefly why moving from job to batch production might save money for a manufacturer.

3. Why may batch production cause storage problems?

4. Outline the major costs, specific to batch production, that business will incur.

5. State three types of business that use batch production and explain why.

3. Read the text again. Find and write down a word or words in the text that mean the same as the following definitions. They are in the same order as they appear in the text.

1. a number of things or people which belong together as a group;

2. a way of doing something;

3. happening or done at exactly the same time as something;

4. the group of people who work for a particular organization;

5. not doing anything;

6. a way of solving a problem;

7. to connect somebody or something;

8. an amount of goods or money, etc. that you do not have to use or spend;

9. total or sum of money.

Vocabulary

Using your dictionary, match words in A with their synonyms in B.

A	B
a) batch	a) amount
b) existence	b) terms
c) stage	c) employee
d) quantity	d) restriction
e) design	e) being
f) to accuse	f) rise
g) workforce	g) to supply
h) disruptive	h) to blame
i) constraint	i) group
j) conditions	j) reluctant
k) increase	k) plan
1) unwilling	1) destructive
m) to provide	m) customer
n) consumer	n) level

Pre-reading task

Work in small groups.

Now you are going to read about flow production. What do you think it is based on?

Reading

1. Read text 12 quickly. Were your ideas about the principles of flow production correct?

TEXT 12

FLOW PRODUCTION

We have already seen that in batch production each item in the batch has to wait until all other items have completed that stage of the production process before it can move, with the rest of the batch, to the next stage of production. Flow production is a method of organizing the work processes where each individual item being produced moves on to the next stage of production immediately. This eliminates the waiting time and the existence of large quantities of stock and work in progress. On the other hand it requires the business to be very specific about the design of the product and demands a high degree of standardization in terms of tools, methods and parts used. Machinery is arranged in lines according to the order of its function in the overall process and the operators tend to have a more limited range of tasks to perform. For flow production to be viable in terms of the investment required there must be a comparatively large and steady market for the goods being produced. The product, therefore, must appeal to a wide range of customers. Flow production utilizes the concepts of simplification, standardization and specialization to a far greater extent than either job or batch production.

Flow production has been accused of reducing the status of the workforce to that of mere cogs in a machine, taking from them their pride in their jobs and the satisfaction inherent in seeing a completed product. The amount of investment in machinery to keep the line flowing and the disruptive effects of a breakdown or bottleneck in any part of the line can impose constraints on other parts of the business. The purchasing department, faced with the costs of an idle production line, might find reliability the most important priority in its purchasing mix and give price a far lower priority than it might have done under conditions of job or batch production.

2. On the other hand, the use of flow production has brought the majority of consumer durables within the reach of a greater number of people than before. The choice of production method is complex for a business. It can be said to depend on:

• the stage of development a business has reached;

• the nature of the product;

• the size of the market;

• the frequency of demand.

A start-up business making a standard good, e.g. furniture or clothes, is likely to work on a job production method. The orders are unlikely to be big and will not justify the large investment in labour and machinery for batch or flow production. As the orders increase they may move towards batch production, and several large orders for a range of garments for a specific line might make batch production viable, but these orders may not be repeated.

Some businesses will never make the transition. The owner may want to produce for only a limited market or be unwilling to undertake the additional risk. The production of luxury goods with high status appeal is likely to be undertaken by job production methods.

An international company producing antibiotics does so under conditions of batch production, as do breweries. Both industries have the same basic task: to provide the ideal environment in terms of food and warmth for micro-organisms to flourish and give off their desired by-product. In the case of beer the by-product is alcohol, for the drug companies, antibiotics. The organisms are different, the temperature, food and end product are different, but the principles are the same. Essentially the process is the loading of a large vessel with the required food, the monitoring of the temperature and the production of a batch of the product. It has much in common with our earlier example of a batch of loaves.

In a large brewery the products of this type of batch production are likely to be processed using flow production methods. It will be the responsibility of the production manager to make sure that batches are ready to feed the bottling production line. This combination of production methods is common in industry.

A machine may have a variety of uses but needs to be retooled when moved from one use to another. Retooling is the term used for resetting a machine to do a different job. With some machines using, for example, computer and/or laser technology this can be a relatively simple task. Other machines require the services of a skilled toolmaker to make the change. It therefore makes sense to make a batch of products which need the same tools before changing the machine to make another batch of products.