A Deterministic Product Ramp-up Process: How to Integrate a Multi-Disciplinary Knowledge Base

Abstract

Ramping up new products to volume production is a challenge for most manufacturing companies. The deviation between plan and reality of costs and duration of ramp-up projects is still significant, and the achievable quality of new products at the start-up of volume production is difficult to predict. Consequently, new products arrive too late at the customer, causing dissatisfaction or even loss of customers, additional operational costs or unplanned enhancement of ramp-up budget. The vertical knowledge exchange between product engineering and process engineering, as well as horizontally along the production process and the supply chain has turned out to be the major reason for deviations. This chapter describes how information from product engineering and process engineering has to be structured for automated recommendation of information reuse during the planning of ramp-up projects. It discusses the involvement of a multi-disciplinary knowledge base in a production environment but also organizational measures to be taken into account in order to address this challenge. Needs for standardization across enterprises is addressed as well. Through thus achievable improvement of planning quality, based on reused production knowledge, ramp-up projects can improve towards deterministic ramp-up processes. The article is of interest for industrial engineers, quality managers and ICT-managers in the industrial field.