Improving Material Flows in an Industrial Enterprise: A Comprehensive Case Study Analysis
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)
Comments and Suggestions for Authors The article aims to improve the layout of a beam manufacturing workstation in a Slovak engineering company using digital factory tools and material flow analysis. Literature review of the article is very detailed, I would like to emphasize this... Current research articles are mentioned and cited. The article itself describes the data collection and analysis methods used to identify the inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement in the existing layout of the beam workstation, as well as the software tools and simulation techniques used to create and validate the proposed layout solution. Results and discussion present the comparison between the current and the design layout variants, showing a significant reduction in production time, material flow distance, and transport costs, as well as a visual representation of the layout changes using virtual simulation. I recommend for further publishing. Question for authors: Why did you choose visTABLE software to verify the proposed solution?
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to sincerely thank you for your detailed and positive review of our article. Your emphasis on the thorough literature review is greatly appreciated, and we are pleased that you acknowledged our effort to include current scientific articles and their citations.
Regarding your inquiry about our choice of visTABLE software for verifying the proposed solution, allow me to acquaint you with the reasons behind our decision. Firstly, we opted for this software based on close collaboration and communication with the company's management. Their recommendations and experiences with visTABLE were invaluable to us in selecting a tool for the simulation and validation of the proposed solution.
Furthermore, we selected visTABLE because this software is available at our research facility. This availability enabled us to work efficiently and thoroughly with the tools we had at our disposal without the need to invest in additional licenses or other costly resources.
Once again, we express our gratitude for your attention and support of our article. Should you have any further questions or comments, we would be delighted to address them.
With utmost respect,
The Authors
Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
P3_L12: What exactly ‘production forces’ mean?
P3_L140: The reference number of Michieta et al. should be added.
P4_L159: The reference number of Cosme et al. should be added.
P5: Generally, the part of literature review does not show what has been done in your study area. Too broad area is explained in this section so that which previous works are related with your work. The pros and cons of previous works are nor clearly shown so that it is difficult for readers to understand why your work is important and needed. The conclusion at the last part is not seems to be extracted from the explained previous works. It is recommended to rewrite this part.
P6: In section 3, the specified method to configure workplace should be explained. The used software is described. But, how the workplace design should be done is not explained in detail.
P7: In Section 4.2, the description of company’s activity seems not to be related design workplace directly.
P7: in section 4.3, it should be explain how the variety of products is related with workplace design.
P15: in section 5, all the work seem to be done by visTABLE and what should be done considering what? There is no guideline to rearrange workplace layout.
Comments on the Quality of English Language
English can be understandable. Some phrases are not well used in journal papers. Some scientific modifications seems to be needed.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
This article mainly uses visTABLE software to re-plan the physical factory building. In theory, this paper should be a technical report. Although the author made a comparison, it was limited to comparison before and after using visTABLE software planning.
In terms of research papers, on the one hand it should be possible to make a series of comparisons, or the same factory should be designed and planned using different software.
Although the current planning is great and better than before, I believe that a factory building would be better if it were redesigned, and perhaps using other software would be equally better. So I suggest the author elaborate on this point.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
This article is very interesting and practically oriented. In my opinion, it is suitable for publication in the journal Machines after the minor correction below:
1) in Table 7, it should be provided information about currency
2) Table 8, Table 9, and accompanying text should be provided in the previous part of the article – “Results and Discussion”
3) the conclusion part of the article should provide information about the contribution to the practice and science
4) the conclusion part of the article should also provide the main results in bullets
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Generally, the contents in this paper need to be reorganized to give proper information to readers. Since proposed methods and results are mixed, it is difficult to understand and follow the proposed method.
In section 2 literature review, it is difficult to find what is missing in previous works and what should be improved. Some of reviewed papers seems not directly to deal with the objective of the authors’ problem. Please, try to remove less directly connected papers with the authors’ objectives and focus on the paper’s objectives (ex. Workplace design, layout configuration considering efficiency and productivity, material flow among workstations).
P3_L160: ‘Cosme et al’->‘Cosme et al.’
P3_L139-L158: The mentioned previous work is not much directly related with this paper. It is needed to focus on more related papers regarding to the authors’ work.
P5_L241-243: Please, check and correct the sentence to complete.
P5_L251: The sentence seems to be broken. Please, check.
P5_L254: In previous explanation, one of the objectives of proposed method is material flow. And why KPI for material flow is not defined?
P6: In the explanation of systematic methodology (six pivotal stages), the way how these states can be done should be explained, not what is done. Based on your study, the readers can follow or adopt your method in their field. However, the detained explanation that how six pivotal stages should be performed is still vague. This paper shows only result not the method. So, it looks like technical report not research paper.
P7_L319: Who is “He’? Generally, in research paper, “He, She” are not well used.
P7: In section 4.1, the explanation of company seems not much related with the objective of your work.
P7-P8: In section 4.2 and 4.3, it will be more readable to focus on the layout status and related stuff. Too much information that is not much affected with layout is included in these sections.
P10: The figure 3 provides the same information as Table 1. The area ratio just can be added in table with column. This figure is redundant.
P13: How the production process in Table 3 is related with Table 4 and used for Table 4. When or for what the information in Table 3 is used?
P15: In section 5.1, it is still vague how the targeted factory is applied in visTABLE and how it is done. Which data is inputted in visTABLE for your study specifically. And how is the better way decided? It is done by human experience or systemic method?
P19: In section 6, it will be helpful to describe how the modified layout design is decided rather than what is altered.
Comments on the Quality of English Language
Some sentecnes seem to be broken. Some words that are not much used research paper are used from time to time. In generall, it is recommended to improve English with research paper terms.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The reviewed comments are well considered and modified.
Comments on the Quality of English Language
Please, check the final typo.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Dear Authors,
This article intends to compile a proposal for improving the layout solution in an enterprise that manufactures cranes, crane tracks, and related goods to reduce material flows between individual workplaces. The visTABLE software was used and the result was the reduction of the production time of the beam by 10 minutes.
The introduction and literature review are consistent with the topic covered; however, the rest of the article must be reviewed, as the article as written does not add any academic or scientific value, it only superficially reports on the way in which a layout was rearranged resulting in a decrease of just 0.54% compared to the original solution. This value for a manufacturer is very small, as any type of failure that may occur in production can already absorb this value. There are other variants of this type of problem. It was also not clear how the authors arrived at the final solution, whether it was through trial and error, or whether they used some type of algorithm, this information and the procedures carried out to reach the solution must be very detailed in the article. Here are some suggestions for the article:
1) According to Machine Aims: “Our goal is to encourage scientists to publish their experimental and theoretical results in as much detail as possible. There is no restriction on the maximum length of work. Full experimental and/or methodical details must be provided.” This is not how the article is written, and it should be revised and rewritten.
Link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/machines/about
2) References: “References must be numbered in order of appearance in the text (including table captions and figure captions).” Correct the numbering of all references starting with the Introduction chapter.
3) Review the concept of what chapter 3. Material and Methods is about, as what was presented in this chapter were the specifications of the Case Study. Redo chapter 3.
4) Everything that was written in chapter 3 changing to a “Cap 4. Case Study”, the case study was very well described, just make some changes.
5) In Table 2, line 349, as the Time Duration unit is in hours, it is necessary to change the value of operation number 7 to 0.5 instead of 0.3; operation number 9, change to 2.5 instead of 2.3; Operation number 10 changed it to 0.5 instead of 0.3.
6) In Table 3, line 373, as in “Operation type” the “Delay and Storage” columns are not used, delete from the table, they do not add anything.
7) Line 401 and 408, check the table number;
8) Line 424, check table number.
9) Line 434, check the table number.
10) Line 441, check the table number.
11) Line 449, check the table number.
12) Chapter 4, line 465 changes from “Results” to “Proposal” or something similar, it is in this chapter that the authors must present all the proposal procedures in depth and clearly. Present why certain choices were made, explain exactly what, and why a certain decision was made. It is necessary to rewrite this new chapter in detail. Remember: “There is no restriction on the maximum extent of the work. Full experimental and/or methodical details must be provided.”
13) In line 475, when you call a figure in the text, you don't need to place it below and others; with the numbering, it is possible to identify it.
14) Figure 5, line 477 does not add any value to the text; it can be excluded, or if it is to be kept, detail why it is important.
15) Line 507, changing from “Discussion” to “Results and Discussion”, improve the chapter by presenting the results in more depth and discussing them, it is necessary to review the numbering of all figures so that the text is in agreement Likewise when placing two figures together and related, the letters a and b can be placed to better identify them.
16) In Figure 8, line 521, it was not clear that the two figures were demonstrating, trying to include the figure always at the same angle and distance, highlighting only the differences, and including the letters “a, b” to differentiate them. It is necessary to improve the text on these figures.
17) In Figure 9, line 527, it was not clear what the two figures were demonstrating, trying to include the figure always at the same angle and distance, highlighting only the differences, and including the letters “a, b” to differentiate them. It is necessary to improve the text on these figures.
18) In Figure 10, line 532, it was not clear what the two figures were demonstrating, trying to include the figure always at the same angle and distance, highlighting only the differences, and including the letters “a, b” to differentiate them. It was not possible to understand anything about Figure 10, the text about these figures needs to be greatly improved.
19) Delete lines 544 to 550, it has no relation to the article described and you cannot expect the benefits presented without prior analysis. It can be stated in the "Conclusion" that in future works, we intend to introduce 5S and verify its benefits.
20) Line 561, greatly improve the Conclusions and number them correctly, line 561, place Table 9 in Chapter 5 and their respective texts.
21) In line 584 the word optimize was used; however, the article did not present any algorithm that finds the optimum, check.
Kind regards
Author Response
Kindly find enclosed the response for your reference. Should you require any further assistance or clarification, please do not hesitate to reach out. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The manuscript, titled as "Digital Transformation of Material Flow and Workplace Design: A Comprehensive Case Study Analysis", adopts the visTable to analyse the performance of different layout design. However, the relevance to digital transformation is not clear. TO me, this study is merely a simulation analysis with a limited scenarios considered. Some comments are suggested to authors as follows:
- Simulation has been widely used in the layout design problems. However, the content in this study seems less-relevant to the digital transformation.
- The uniquess, innovation and research motivation are not clear in this study.
- The necessity to develop the digital twin/digital transformation is not clear. It seems that authors merely follow the trendy technology to prepare this work. Some digital twin-related studies are suggested for your consideration:
a. A multi-agent digital twin–enabled decision support system for sustainable and resilient supplier management. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 187, 109838. (2024).
b. Automated generation of digital twin for a built environment using scan and object detection as input for production planning. Journal of Industrial Information Integration, 33, 100462. (2023).
- In Literature Review, authors should review more about your targetted production environment, e.g. job shop? Also, there are a number of digital transformation/digital twin studies in such areas. The comparison with existing studies should be made to highlight the value of this work.
- The system architecture of your proposed solution should be prepared, rather than directly giving a case study in Section 3.
- In the case study, it is like a traditional simulation analysis. Is there element/feature about the digital twin/digital transformation? Can your proposed solution be implemented to optimise the layout continuously?
- More scenario analysis could be made.
- Insights and implications of this work should be strengthened.
Comments on the Quality of English Language
It's acceptable.
Author Response
Kindly find enclosed the response for your reference. Should you require any further assistance or clarification, please do not hesitate to reach out. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
This paper is a mere description of an application case of software for commercial production engineering. Describes the input and the output with some printouts of the graphical user interface.
The application doesn’t reveal the algorithms used to propose the changes in the layout. The improvements are low. The title of the case application the Digital Factory is over-dimensioned concerning the content.
The introduction starts with references starting numbering from [9], suggesting a change in the paragraph's revision without any ulterior revision. Some calls to authors don’t contain proper cite numbers (v.g. line 137 Lee et al. or 161 Baron et al. or line 174 Kovac et al.). The introduction is generalities conceptually far beyond the software application. The redaction style requires refining (just an example, line 147 “Experimental experiments are conducted…”).
The methodology is absent from the paper, so it only includes the input and output of the software. When some calculations are tried to be explained, the flaws put evidence of the former: equation (1) is inconsistent in dimensions, so the first member is piece*meter/month and the second member kg*m . The same for equation (2) where N (EUR) and the second member are kgr*EUR/m. That’s all before the results. The time saving after optimization of the digital factory is 0.5%.
Due to the absence of methodology as a research paper, lack of rigor, and scarce informative and appreciative industrial improvement, I recommend rejection to the editor.
Comments on the Quality of English Language
It requires some style revision
Author Response
Kindly find enclosed the response for your reference. Should you require any further assistance or clarification, please do not hesitate to reach out. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Dear Authors
All suggestions were made, and the article was much better in this way.
There is just one small point: Normally we do not include tables in the conclusion, please check.
Kind regards
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
First and foremost, we would like to extend my sincere gratitude for your insightful review. Your feedback is highly valued and appreciated.
We wholeheartedly agree with your observation regarding the placement of the table in the conclusion; you are correct in pointing out its significance. However, We would like to provide some context regarding its positioning. The decision to include the table in the conclusion was based on the recommendation of the second reviewer. Nevertheless, I acknowledge your perspective that the conclusion may not be the most appropriate section for such content.
Rest assured, we will consider this for our future research endeavors. Your valuable input has shed light on an aspect that warrants further attention and refinement. We are committed to incorporating this feedback to enhance the quality and clarity of our future work.
Once again, thank you for your time, effort, and invaluable contribution to our manuscript.
Warm regards,
The Authors
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
I have no further comment to this work. Good luck.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
I wish to extend my sincerest gratitude to you for dedicating your time to review our scientific article. Your commitment to providing us with valuable insights is deeply appreciated and truly commendable. Your thoughtful contributions have significantly enriched the quality of our work, allowing us to incorporate pertinent ideas that enhance its overall impact.
Thank you once again for your meticulous attention to detail and for your invaluable feedback. Your expertise and dedication to the advancement of scholarly research are immensely valuable to us and the scientific community at large.
With utmost appreciation,
The Authors.
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The mere long polite responses and plenty of verbosity to the revision don't change the basic weak content of a discoursive paper showing a case application of commercial software. Getting marginal improvement in shop operation metrics and with the only argument from the authors' side claiming for the faith of the reader in their exposition, the reality of the case, and the commercial software. The lack of contribution or methodology (except the blind use of input/output the soft) represents a barrier in my opinion to considering it a research paper for a research journal. Even so, it might be well considered a case application black-box type (input/output and screen printouts) for commercial software promo, but in my view not for a research journal.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
