There is growing interest in the industrialization of house building methods in the UK. Much of the focus has been on the use of manufactured structural components, which addresses the inherent problems of reliance on 'wet trades' but not of the quality and efficiency of the assembly and 'fitting' processes on site. The house building process has tended to develop more through custom and practice rather than formal analysis of methods. There is a lack of standards, and of mechanisms for process review or sharing knowledge and good practice. The result is significant process variability on site. Process documentation is a rigorous description of a process, procedure or policy to facilitate training, and development of consistency of operations and standards. The paper presents work on a process documentation system, and discusses the organizational changes needed to create the cultural environment for process standardization and improvement.house building, build process, information system, change management,
Management of complexity arising from high levels of product variety is a critical problem in the automotive and other industries. In the premium vehicle sector, this is particularly important with customer expectation of personalized products. The levels of resultant complexity in business operations, from product development to supply, lead to erosion in profitability and/or a higher price for the consumer. An integrated framework to analyse variety, complexity, and its associated costs to guide product development decisions is not well developed. This paper presents a high-level design for variety framework to inform decisions on variety and complexity, underpinned by cost and revenue analysis. The work potentially has much wider application than just in the premium vehicle sector.
Line balancing and manpower assign ment is a particularly complicated task in a mixed model assembly line and especially in the final assembly tracks of the automobile industry because of factors peculiar to such tracks. The major problem is the very large difference in work content between the different derivatives flowing through the track. This paper describes a computer simulation system developed to evaluate a man assignment against the criteria of maximising operator utilisation, cateringfor flexibility in derivative mix/sequence and keeping operator drift to permitted levels. A discussion on development of computerised line balancing techniques for the industry is also included.
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