Flexible manufacturing system

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a manufacturing system in which there is some amount of flexibility that allows the system to react in case of changes, whether predicted or unpredicted. The basic idea of the system is to: Use all (similar) connected machines as parallel resources, meaning every machine can manufacture every operation of every part, thus increasing the utilization of the connected machines and Separate the task of the human operations (part clamping and unclamping) from the task of the machines by doing the part clamping in separate setup stations instead of doing it on the machine table, thus consolidating the need of human work to longer stints, with the possibility to totally unmanned operations in between them.

Source: Wikipedia — Flexible manufacturing system (CC BY-SA 4.0)