High Product Variety Research Articles

Convertibility Evaluation of Automated Assembly System Designs for High Variety Production

The recent advancements in technology and the high volatility in automotive market compel industries to design their production systems to offer the required product variety. Although, paradigms such as reconfigurable modular designs, changeable manufacturing, holonic and agent based systems are widely discussed to satisfy the need for product variety management, it is essential to practically assess the initial design at a finer level of granularity, so that those designs deemed to lack necessary features can be flagged and optimised. In this research, convertibility expresses the ability of a system to change to accommodate product variety. The objective of this research is to evaluate the system design and quantify its responsiveness to change for product variety. To achieve this, automated assembly systems are decomposed into their constituent components followed by an evaluation of their contribution to the system's ability to change. In a similar manner, the system layout is analysed and the measures are expressed as a function of the layout and equipment convertibility. The results emphasize the issues with the considered layout configuration and system equipment. The proposed approach is demonstrated through the conceptual design of battery module assembly system, and the benefits of the model are elucidated.

Fair allocation of cost reductions for a scale-based product family in a hierarchically structured firm

Size ranges are a widespread type of product family design, which are used to combine high product variety and cost reductions. For the purposes of motivation and remuneration, these cost reductions should be shared in a fair way between the employees. The nature of cooperative cost reductions is super-additive - a fact which impedes a fair assignment. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to present an approach for calculating and fairly allocating a cost reduction in a hierarchically structured firm. The process of designing and producing size ranges is modelled as a cost-reduction game within a hierarchically structured organisation. Assuming a hierarchical organisation, this study presents a mechanism which distributes this cost reduction across all contributing employees in the firm. The research shows that cost growth laws are suitable for calculating the costs of all members of a product family based on the basic draft using physical characteristics.

Integrated Description of Grinding Wheels Operating Capacity

The article presents a new regime-tool equipment of grinding operations for short-run environment based on the integrated description of grinding wheels working capacity. Implementing such equipment requires getting the data of the working capacity of grinding wheels and compiling the manufacturing and operating tool certificate. A test system was created in order to perform tests of abrasive tools in real time mode. In accordance with the developed strategy of compiling the manufacturing and operating tool certificate, the benchmark tests of grinding wheels with different characteristics, which work using the chart of cylindrical grinding with radial feed, were made. Based on the results of the wheels’ benchmark tests the manufacturing and operating tool certificates, which contain a set of a wheel operability index changing due to the time and grinding mode of the wheel, were developed. The suggested regime-tool equipment of grinding operations allows using the tool life efficiently in the modern high-variety production.

Complementing lean with quick response manufacturing: case studies

Operations management researchers have largely studied and analysed lean manufacturing (LM) for its capacity for productivity improvement in industry. Even so, this approach has found several difficulties in dealing with all production types, especially in high-variety and low-volume production. Managers have complemented other approaches to LM to resolve those issues, but there is little research considering quick response manufacturing (QRM). This research shows how QRM can complement LM in a make-to-order environment. Two cases were analysed, where both approaches were used in a complementary way. Data were collected throughout interviews, document analyses and observation. As the main result, we show that QRM complements LM by means of incorporating concepts of system dynamics, exclusively focusing on lead time reduction and the continuous monitoring of utilisation levels.

From loop structure to policy-making: a CONWIP design framework for hybrid flow shop control in one-of-a-kind production environment

A feasible constant work in process (CONWIP) policy can guide developer to better implement CONWIP system. The feasible policy should be selected from alternatives by evaluation. Therefore, how to generate more than one CONWIP alternative policy to evaluate is an inevitable problem in CONWIP practice. From the perspective of loop structure, we propose CONWIP design framework (CDF) which is a systematic design approach to obtain CONWIP alternative policies. The basic concepts and components for CDF are discussed in this paper. Based on CDF, we make 10 CONWIP alternative policies for hybrid flow shop in one-of-a-kind production environment, and these alternative policies are evaluated by simulation. The simulation result implies that (i) the CONWIP alternative policy with robustness has the potential to cope with more fluctuations in high-variety production environment; (ii) a better design for CONWIP policy will be able to enhance the system performance in practice; and (iii) the loop structure can serve as a parameter of CONWIP.

MINIMIZATION OF WORK PROCESS TIME USING LEAN MANUFACTURING TOOL

Small amd medium scale enterprices(SMEs) are the backbone of the economy system. in context with consistency and its survival they are struggling before the customer market, because of the poor maintenance of quality and accuracy of the product and also varieties andvariations of the products in customer views. Due to increased customer demands, high product variety, and a push production system, the organizations have been suffering from excessive wastes, poor working environment,Which increases the production cost and product delays also, Under such conditions, improvement in existing working systems through the continuous improvement techniques are most usefull. in this regard the use of lean manufacturing techniques are more effective for the SMEs. in this work we are using 5S as a lean tool for achieving the work flow, cleaning the production process by removing wastes in the organization. Which represents a fundamental technique to enhancing the of efficiency and productivity, with systematic organizational work culture. In this reaserch work, we are aiming to review the applications of 5S study and its efficiency in the various organizations, then through the case study of medium organization how the efficiency and productivity performance can possible is achieved in with good results.

Фотосинтетична продуктивність посіву люпину вузьколистого залежно від технологічних прийомів

Фотосинтетична продуктивність посіву люпину вузьколистого залежно від технологічних прийомів

Simulation of Manufacturing System at Different Part Mix Ratio and Routing Flexibility

In present market scenario, manufacturing industries need to focus towards capability to provide high product variety and availability of products at the point of demand. This situation creates pressure on manufacturing firms to be flexible and to reduce lead time to fulfill customer's demand on time. Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) with appropriate Routing Flexibility (RF) in addition to different scheduling strategies is the appropriate manufacturing alternative in such a case. Such systems are capable to adjust changing product mix yet providing higher performance in dynamic business environment. This research work presents simulation analysis of a FMS with varying Routing Flexibility (RF) level at different part mix ratio to validate this. The results show that varying part mix ratio has appreciable effect on the system performance, when no routing flexibility is present in the system. Also for all product mix ratios, increase in routing flexibility levels continues to improve MST performance with diminishing return.

Decision support for design of reconfigurable rotary machining systems for family part production

To remain competitive in currently unpredictable markets, the enterprises must adapt their manufacturing systems to frequent market changes and high product variety. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs) promise to offer a rapid and cost-effective response to production fluctuations under the condition that their configuration is attentively studied and optimised. This paper presents a decision support tool for designing reconfigurable machining systems to be used for family part production. The objective is to elaborate a cost-effective solution for production of several part families. This design issue is modelled as a combinatorial optimisation problem. An illustrative example and computational experiments are discussed to reveal the application of the proposed methodology. Insight gained would be useful to the decision-makers managing the configuration of manufacturing systems for diversified products.

Smart mobile apps for supporting product design and decision-making in the era of mass customisation

Nowadays, manufacturing industries face the need to rapidly and effectively adapt to the fast changing market demands that are affected by globalisation, economic instability and customer needs towards higher product variety. Rigid centralised decision-making and IT infrastructures are no longer a viable solution for a company to withstand the globalised market pressure. Information on core activities of a company, such as the manufacturing network design, needs to be constantly available to managers and planners to increase awareness and supervision efficiency. Mobility and remote decision-making is steadily gaining ground as the standard practice in the inter-connected business world. Moreover, the personalisation of products tailored to the individual needs and preferences of the customers can now be achieved through mobile applications, namely apps. Yet, the establishment of mobile apps in the manufacturing domain is still premature. The work proposed in this article presents a set of mobile apps developed to support the customer integration in the product design phase and subsequently the design of the manufacturing network. The applicability of the developed mobile apps is demonstrated through a pilot case from the automotive sector, and specifically, from the customisation of accessories and car aesthetics.

Cognitive shape similarity assessment for 3D part search

Mass customization aims to satisfy diverse customer requirements with high product variety while maintaining reasonable manufacturing cost and lead time. Allowing customers to perceive product differentiation is a critical factor for most design methods developed for mass customization. This study examines 3D part search from the human cognitive perspective. We designed and conducted a quasi-factorial experiment to understand how structured variations of four factors—the shape, type, dimension, and location of the feature volume of a part model—affect human judgment of part similarity. The corresponding factorial similarity values were computed with different shape signatures in the form of the feature adjacency graph. The human responses were obtained by paired comparisons of test parts, and quantified as the cognitive similarity. Statistical analysis of the experimental results showed that the type and shape factors played an important role in the subjects’ judgments. Back-propagation neural networks were trained to model the correlations between the cognitive and the factorial similarity values. The performance of the networks validates our idea of incorporating human cognition into assessment of 3D part similarity. This study presents a systematic approach for personalized part search that reflects individual perception of shape similarity.

Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling with Dual-Resource Constraints to Minimize Tardiness Using Genetic Algorithm

In general, both machines and human resources are needed for processing a job on production floor. However, most classical scheduling problems have ignored the possible constraint caused by availability of workers and have considered only machines as a limited resource. In addition, along with production technology development, routing flexibility appears as a consequence of high product variety and medium demand for each product. Routing flexibility is caused by capability of machines that offers more than one machining process. This paper presents a method to address scheduling problem constrained by both machines and workers, considering routing flexibility. Scheduling in a Dual-Resource Constrained shop is categorized as NP-hard problem that needs long computational time. Meta-heuristic approach, based on Genetic Algorithm, is used due to its practical implementation in industry. Developed Genetic Algorithm uses indirect chromosome representative and procedure to transform chromosome into Gantt chart. Genetic operators, namely selection, elitism, crossover, and mutation are developed to search the best fitness value until steady state condition is achieved. A case study in a manufacturing SME is used to minimize tardiness as objective function. The algorithm has shown 25.6% reduction of tardiness, equal to 43.5 hours.

A Model for Complexity Assessment in Manual Assembly Operations Through Predetermined Motion Time Systems

Manual assembly processes are favoured for supporting low volume production systems, high product variety, assembly operations that are difficult to automate and manufacturing in low-wage countries. However, manual operations can dramatically impact assembly cycle times, quality and cost when the complexity of the manual operation increases. This paper proposes a method for assessing the process complexity of manual assembly operations, using a representation of manual operations based on predetermined motion time systems. The purpose of this framework is to provide a tool that can be used practically to assess, and therefore control, the complexity of manual operations during their design.

Multi-variant Truck Production - Product Variety and its Impact on Production Quality in Manual Assembly

The trend of diversifying product portfolios increases the challenges for global manufactures to keep production processes robust and maintain high quality. Manufacturing trucks with high level of customization increases the vulnerability to quality deviations in the assembly process. By studying eight manual assembly stations, at a truck manufacturing plant, it was found that high product variety has negative impact on production quality and that high production complexity is connected to high product variety. The study also showed that if operators do not have proper information systems, with accurate data, they need to trust their own knowledge and skills. Results imply that more research is needed to address how the production of products with high variety can be handled to lower the exposure to quality deviations.

Complexity and Operations Performance: A Case Study

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1. IntroductionOne of the popular competitive strategies used by automakers is to increase their product portfolio. They must have seen that this strategy works well despite the fact that more variety of products causes escalating costs and complexity in the manufacturing systems (Alford, Sackett, & Nelder, 2000). Producing high variety products within greater production volumes is a strategy known as mass customization (MC). Managing MC environments involves managing many production or operational complexities and balancing of workforce (Zhu, Hu, Koren, & Marin, 2008), planning and managing logistics (Wilding, 1998), and developing and operationalizing product structure architecture (Vickery, Koufteros, Droge, & Calantone, 2016), to name a few.Sometimes, there are cause-effect relations among product variety, production flexibility and operational complexity (Hu, et al., 2011). That is, product variety may require production flexibility, which results in operational complexity (Fisher & Ittner, 1999). With higher product variety, MC offers competitive advantages, if effectively managed. However, if not well-managed, MC may lead to many problems such as increase in production cost, decrease in product quality and delayed delivery (Gotzfried, 2012).The purpose of this work is to analyze the relationship between production complexity and operational performance in an MC production environment, typical in automobile industry of commercial vehicles, such as trucks and buses. From the review of Operations Management (OM) literature, we identified some research opportunities. The relate to the definition of multiple strategies for assembly lines (Da Silva, Tubino, & Seibel, 2015); and designing assembly systems more efficient to shorten time-to-market (Rekiek, De Lit, & Delchambre, 2002).Product variety may have impact on all the functions of a company, including operations, finance, marketing, design, and human resources functions and more. Nevertheless, this study will focus on operational performance in the areas of production and logistics. Specially, our focus is on the production of truck cabins by a Brazilian plant of a transnational company. This plant operates in an MC environment. Information Entropy (Frizelle & Suhov, 2008) is the main complexity measure in this study. In workstations with manual operations, combinations of assembly do influence operational performance, causing assembly errors and delivery delays.Section 2 of the research presents literature review on mass customization and conceptualizes information entropy. Section 3 presents the research methodology. Section 4 presents the research case. Section 5 presents the information entropy calculation and analyses the relationship between operation complexity and operation performance. Summaries, conclusions and recommendations from the research are presented in Section 6.2. Literature Review2.1. Mass CustomizationProduct variety does stimulate sales and does satisfy some specific requirements from customers, and this creates the need for MC (Xia & Rajagopalan, 2009). By offering customized products, companies may reduce competitive pressures in that this make direct comparisons of their products with the products of their competitors impossible or difficult to make and thereby avoiding price wars (Lancaster, 1990). MC environment allows higher returns for suppliers because customers are usually willing to pay more for products that perfectly meet their requirements (Ulrich, 2011). The heterogeneity of products in MC also enhances operational performance. If demand for a product drops, the plant can continue operating by replacing the production of the product with the production of another product. In this way, MC production plants are much more capable of absorbing the negative effect of market fluctuations than plants with smaller mix of products (Fisher & Ittner, 1999). …

The analysis of consumers' satisfaction about the 6th industry antenna shops

The 6th industrialization, which is the policy strategy to combine the 1st, 2nd, 3rd agro-food industries in order to create synergy effects, is one of the most important policy strategies for the Korean government. Local governments as well as the central government, especially the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, have introduced various specific programs for the 6th industrialization. Among them, the 6th industry antenna shops located in Cheonan and Daejeon which were introduced by the Chungcheongnam-do Provincial Government to offer a better market place for 6th industry producers. However, few studies have been conducted to evaluate the performance of 6th industry antenna shops. The purpose of this paper is to analyze satisfaction of 6th industry antenna shops through survey and econometric modeling and to present some implications of the better operation of the 6th industry antenna shops. The results of the studies in this paper present some of the following findings: first, the overall level of satisfaction towards 6th industry antenna shops is high but consumers still claim some problems. Second, products which are sold at 6th industry antenna shops have important problems, including high prices and deficient product variety. Third, if these problems were fixed, the operation of 6th industry antenna shops would be successful and contribute to the development of 6th industrialization in Korea.

Продуктивность нетрадиционных садовых культур в условиях Кировской области

Results of perennial study of 31 varieties of honeysuckle, 19 varieties of sea buckthorn, 13 elite plantlets of filbert, and 6 forms of quince on productivity and stability of fructification under conditions of Kirov region are presented in the article. The researches were shown sharp variations of productivity levels of non-traditional crops in dependence of weather conditions of year . Moreover, fructification of sea buckthorn suffered significant influence of damages with seabuckthorn fruit fly. As a result of investigation high-productive (1.43-2.82 kg/bush) honeysuckle varieties were selected: Slavyanka, Bogdana, Amphora, Viola, Nizhegorodskaya rannyaya, Morena, and Suvenir. Three varieties had high and stable productivity level: Suvenir, Viola, and Nizhegorodskaya rannyaya. Form 988-11 had good level of stable productivity. Study of productivity in 19 samples of sea buckthorn had shown its significant variability by years of researches from 0.39 (2007) up to 7.0 (2008) kg/plant. Grouping of investigated varieties on level of fructification allowed to select high productive (17/91, Kudrina, Dyujmovochka, Nizhegorodskij souvenir, 7-70-13-91) and productive (Zarevo, 24/91) samples. Four buckthorn varieties had stable fructification - Kudrina, Zarevo, 17/91, and 24/91. Perennial study of elite forms of filbert selected on earliness had shown possibility of obtaining of every-year yield of this crop under condition of northern border of its natural area. Forms 1-3-27, 3-12-27 were selected having high and stable productivity level as well as sample 1-2-21 with stable good level of fructification. Study of influence of level of quince plants' subfreezing on its productivity had shown an existence of middle negative relation between these two parameters (r = -0.66). Form 3-99 was selected on productivity. Sample 6-99 had middle stable productivity level.

Method for Evaluating Modularization Potential in Product Design Based on Production Time Variety

Production companies face in a globalized world more uncertainty regarding their product range. Markets demand customized products, which inevitably results in a high variety of companies’ production program. However, the production section of a company has to be able to produce the ever increasing variety of their products profitably. Especially in flow-production a high variety of products results in several challenges, as such as different work operations, quality problems, adaption of manufacturing equipment and different production time slots. Despite that companies must react profitably and flexible to market fluctuations, both in quantity and product range.Obviously there is a strong connection between product design and production: A change in design often times has consequences for manufacturing equipment or production time. Therefore aspects of production complexity have to be taken into consideration for product planning and designing.To address this, a method for product designing is given, which is derived from a manufacturing point of view. The developed framework is based on a product program and is focused on production time variety. The framework has several scanning steps to specify and classify a workstation's complexity regarding production time differences. It helps finding and differentiating process- and product-related reasons for a workstation's complexity. As a result a pattern will be developed to identify workstations in assembly lines that have high potential regarding reducing production time variety. Meaning in particular potential for modularization and reducing time difference between product configurations.

Evaluation of Guidelines for Assembly Instructions

In production industry assembly instructions are often in need of improvement. Today’s instructions are often text based and are used only when learning the assembly. Due to a high product variety the instruction quality need to be perceptual in order for the operator to make fast and correct decisions. To educate and support personnel making instructions five guidelines that support operators’ cognitive abilities have been developed. The guidelines were tested in three case studies with three different used groups: production technicians, students from higher vocational education and bachelor students. Results indicate that the theory behind the instructions is useful and valuable and that further development and testing is needed. The main thing both technicians and students learnt was to support the active cognitive processes, that instructions should be picture based and be as simple as possible.

Card-based delivery date promising in high-variety manufacturing with order release control

Card-based systems – like Kanban and Constant Work-in-Process (ConWIP) – can be simple yet effective means of controlling production. Existing systems, however, can be criticized for their limited applicability and scope. First, card-based systems have not been successful in the production environments that are arguably most in need of their help: complex job shops that produce low-volume, high-variety products. Second, while most existing systems simplify shop floor control, other planning tasks – such as the estimation of short, feasible due dates during customer enquiry management – are not supported. To overcome these limitations, a card-based version of Workload Control – known as COBACABANA (COntrol of BAlance by CArd-BAsed Navigation) – was recently proposed that uses cards for both due date estimation and order release control. This unique combination makes COBACABANA a potentially important means of controlling production, particularly for small job shops with limited resources. However, the original approach had several shortcomings. This paper refines the due date estimation procedure of COBACABANA to make it more practical and consistent with the order release method applied. It then uses simulation to demonstrate – for the first time – the potential of COBACABANA as an integrated concept that combines customer enquiry management and order release control to improve job shop performance. Results also suggest that the need for processing time estimations can be simplified, further facilitating the implementation of COBACABANA in practice.