Abstract
During the last decade, the European manufacturing industry has experienced a growing trend towards customization and personalization. As a response to increasing global competition and changing customer needs, there has been increasing attention to achieving shorter time-to-market, and manufacturing products for smaller market segments. Throughout this paper, the term ‘high variety products’ will be used to describe products that contain at least one product part with a customized geometry. There are two primary aims of this study. First, to illustrate the current challenges that Small- and Medium-sized manufacturers face with high variety products. Second, to explore how these challenges can be addressed systematically. Assembly tasks within existing manufacturing systems for high variety products typically involve a combination of manual labor and automatization. As geometrical variation is considered complex for automation, cost considerations can hinder increasing the level of automation in assembling high variety products. However, this objection might not be legitimate. Hence, this paper proposes a new design method to improve decision making for cost-effectively realizing high variety products. Two core findings of this study include: First, the achievable product variability of a production process depends on the process step least robust to geometrical variation. Second, the adjustability of product design is regarded as an enabler for customization and increased automatization of the production process.
Highlights
We argue that product design can be used to customize its geometry and simultaneously to enhance the automatization of the production process
According to a comparison between manufacturing system analysis methods made by the authors of the Productivity Potential Assessment (PPA) method, assessment methods can be divided into three categories: (1) internal audit; (2) external audit, and (3) selfassessment [5]
We argue that the same line of reasoning can be applied to redesigning high variety of products with improving the ease of automatization in mind
Summary
To illustrate the type of challenges our design method applies to, three examples from industry are presented. The valves are produced on-demand in series sizes ranging from 1 to 100 Their current assembly process is manual where automation of that process has operational and strategic advantages. The different valve sizes and materials all require individually unique plug dimensions and torque For manual assembly, this is no problem, but for automation, this increases the complexity of among others plug storage and resupply, robotic handling, torque control, and camera-based quality inspection. For instance, be the case that small changes in the product design or the production process facilitate a transition from manual labor to automation for some operations Such changes expectedly lower the threshold for cost-effectively realizing higher levels of product variety in manufacturing and assembly. Allows evaluation of the effects of these product modifications against benefits in the production automation stages
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