Reorganisation of material flow for natural grouped assembly work – some principles and results from action research

Abstract

The process of change in the final assembly plants in the Swedish vehicle industry consists partly of an endeavour to develop alternatives to the traditional line systems, thereby increasing the differences between various assembly processes. The development of production systems for long cycle time assembly work demands changes in the product and process structures. In these production systems, which are based on functional wholes instead of additive component tasks, new descriptions of the product and the work are demanded in order, among other things, to make them surveyable. This paper reports some of the results from action research over a five–year period. I discuss principally the consequences of long cycle time assembly work on material flows and layout design. The results reported are: material flow patterns and space requirements; principles for and consequences of naturally grouped work in final assembly in highly parallelized production systems; the relationship between production planning, production control and naturally grouped work; the relationship between parallelization, buffer function and space requirements. The work has been carried out in collaboration with practitioners and in the majority of cases it has been possible to develop and apply results from earlier research in the development of new industrial layouts and production systems. I discuss a number of these basic principles in detail in the following.