DESCRIPTION AND EVALUATION OF SERU PRODUCTION SYSTEM WITH S-F SCHEME

A seru production system is a new manufacturing method developed in Japanese industry. Its essence is removing out traditional assembly conveyor lines and adopting them into mini-assembly units, called seru, a Japanese word for cellular organism. However, until now almost reports about seru production system were from Japan and be not well known in the world. It motivates us to make a comprehensive research to totally investigate seru production system. S-F scheme is a four dimensional paradigm of Substance-structure-form- Function, to show different sides and different features of a thing, qualitatively and quantitatively. We try to use S-F scheme to describe the seru production system, and provide a clustering approach to proof its correctness. Here we collected all the published materials about seru production system, including books, journals, newspapers and websites. 276 factory cases are picked up from the materials. We also select 194 key words from the title of the articles that could be considered to describe the feature of seru production system well. Then a factory-keyword table can be obtained. Clustering those keywords into a S-F scheme based groups then we can describe systematically what be the seru production system, and several insights are proposed.