Sustainable manufacturing is not just about manufacturing, but also products and services. In the area of custom production processes, there may also be circumstances of organizational management where compliance with labor productivity and the due-date principle is problematic. Similar products with different operating times cause the throughput of assembly lines to slow down, increase number of works in progress (WIP), and increase productivity waste. It is possible to reduce this impact through various productivity-enhancing methods and innovations. This paper presents an innovative approach to product segmentation in the assembly phase of custom manufacturing, and a proposal for a new segmentation procedure that will allow significantly better integration of products into existing assembly processes without negatively impacting the company’s production indicators. The scientific problem was defined on the basis that extending existing segmentation by the third dimension of operating times allows products in MTO (made to order) environments to be divided into families with approximately equal operating times. This will increase assembly efficiency in existing medium to large companies without large investments in the development and adaptation of assembly process products. The contributions of this work relate mainly to simple adaptations to existing processes in medium-sized businesses. The proposed solution respects the basic elements of Industry 4.0.

The article is aimed at verifying the state of a real workplace using virtual reality. In analyzing the readiness of virtual reality applications, augmented reality was selected for the following work. The most significant advantage of augmented reality is the implementation of a virtual model and the ability to deal with the analysis in a real environment, which is particularly beneficial in the case of production plants. In the first phase of the work, an analysis of the current state of the workplace was carried out, where the requirements for the design of the new workplace were specified. This was followed by the phase of design preparation in 3D modeller. At this very stage it appeared to be advantageous to use virtual reality applications; in the design process, regular approval procedures are required as for an expert team (management, design, quality, ...), which puts high qualification requirements on the readiness of this team. In this phase, the 3D design of the new workplace was inserted into the application supported by augmented reality and some options were indicated to deal with the ergonomic and risk analysis. The result of this work is, in particular, an extension of options in designing and analyzing production workplaces and machinery in multidisciplinary teams.