Abstract
The smart factories that are already beginning to appear employ a completely new approach to product creation. Smart products are uniquely identifiable and know both their current status and alternative routes to achieving their target state. Smart factories allow individual customer requirements to be met, meaning that even one-off items can be manufactured profitably. In smart industry, dynamic business and engineering processes enable last-minute changes to design and production, delivering the ability to respond flexibly to disruptions and failures on behalf of suppliers. This paper presents a case study of product development and design process renovation according to changeability paradigm in one-of-a-kind industrial environment. It demonstrates how integration of changeability with agile design strategies crucially contribute to improve the operations of a highly individualized product development business. Successful management of ‘never-ending’ engineering changes appears to be the most important aspect in this field. Contribution of the presented work is a generalized framework that demonstrates how companies in such specific environments can improve competitiveness through the utilization of changeability concepts. The included case study validated the proposed changeability model and offers valuable insights into how to implement this in practice.
Highlights
Rough competition in the global marketplace demands highly functional products, high-quality service, shorter delivery lead-time and increased environmental friendliness, all with suitable cost
The analysis clearly shows a considerable drop in necessarily engineering changes, which are the consequence of non-optimal product design
Design for changeability, a design strategy developed to cope with engineering changes, incorporates the following four aspects: adaptability, robustness, agility and flexibility
Summary
Rough competition in the global marketplace demands highly functional products, high-quality service, shorter delivery lead-time and increased environmental friendliness, all with suitable cost. Industry 4.0 is focused on creating smart products, procedures and processes. Self-organizing value chains can be optimized in real time. This requires an appropriate regulatory framework, as well as standardized interfaces and a harmonized business process (Kagermann et al 2013). The decision process will be supported by knowledgeable and self-optimizing manufacturing systems (Yan and Xue 2007; Brettel et al 2014). Introduction of a design history database Introduction of continuous knowledge generation loop and strategic development loop. History of the complete range of product architectures Retention of engineering knowledge
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