Job shop

Job shops are typically small manufacturing systems that handle job production, that is, custom/bespoke or semi-custom/bespoke manufacturing processes such as small to medium-size customer orders or batch jobs. Job shops typically move on to different jobs (possibly with different customers) when each job is completed. Job shops machines are aggregated in shops by the nature of skills and technological processes involved, each shop therefore may contain different machines, which gives this production system processing flexibility, since jobs are not necessarily constrained to a single machine. In computer science the problem of job shop scheduling is considered strongly NP-hard.

In a job shop product flow is twisted, also notice that in this drawing each shop contains a single machine.

A typical example would be a machine shop, which may make parts for local industrial machinery, farm machinery and implements, boats and ships, or even batches of specialized components for the aircraft industry. Other types of common job shops are grinding, honing, jig-boring, gear manufacturing, and fabrication shops.

The opposite would be continuous flow manufactures such as textile, steel, food manufacturing and manual labor.