Changing customer requirements, regulations, technology and regulations, shift to automated assembly and product variety are common challenges faced by many manufacturing industries and alignment between product and production system is critical for business success. Design engineers should be aware of production constraints and capabilities to ensure efficient manufacture and assembly of products that are developed. This requires different and detailed support to guide the work, evaluate different design solutions, enable continuous and concurrent work with design for producibility and production preparation. A study was conducted in three companies to understand alignment and integration of product development and production preparation processes. Also, utilization of production requirements, design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA) and failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) to support design for producibility (DFP) was studied. Currently, production preparation is done through discussions between design and production engineers. Production preparation and work with DFMA and FMEA is skill and experience dependent. Definition, structuring and sharing of production requirements on different system levels, from production and product perspectives are identified as critical to supporting design for producibility and production preparation. The work with FMEA and DFMA can be developed and improved with systematic and structured way of working with production requirements.
The introduction of product platforms has been acknowledged as a strategic enabler for increased business competitiveness. A vast body of research has described different aspects of platforms, but little work has been done on defining or delimiting the different types of elements that may build up a platform. Design assets include platform elements that are not commonly considered as a part of a platform. Previous research has suggested the introduction of formalized design assets to systematically extend an items-based platform with intangible elements. These are transdisciplinary objects, specifically prepared for reuse between projects to provide support for a wide range of engineering activities: specialized CAD geometry, working methods, spread sheets, function models or different types of knowledge representations, among others. The presented research is part of a larger project seeking to improve the collaboration between product development and manufacturing. This paper focuses on the use of potential and formal design assets at a development department of a global manufacturer of consumer products. The results show that the application of formal design assets depends on several factors, such as the level of professional experience and individual working styles. The contribution of the paper is a description of which formal and informal design assets that are used and a discussion on how the formal assets can be better utilized.
New business opportunities are created when the advantage of changeable manufacturing systems expand beyond increased freedom in production location to increased freedom in product design. However, there are new challenges to overcome, including improved ability to design and adapt products when requirements from stakeholders quickly change and/or new technology rapidly evolves. Simultaneously, the producibility of each design must be ensured while keeping the lead-time of the whole process to the minimum. Changeable product platforms (both flexible and adaptable platforms) are gaining attention in both research and industry. However, the level of alignment and integration of product development and production is critical for the efficiency of the product realization process. In this study, we map the state of practice in five companies with an initial literature review. The companies had no formal platform strategy and faced challenges with variant management and development time, had manual processes for production preparation and reuse of technical solutions and knowledge happened through components and documents. The production preparation and reuse were dependent on the engineer’s competence. Future work will concentrate on identifying how manufacturing inputs can be added as a design asset in a changeable product platform to enhance producibility and production preparation.
Improved resource efficiency, in industry and throughout the product life cycle, is a challenge and potentially, integrated product and production platforms can act as support. The aim of this study is to explore the current state of the technical platform in two industrialized housebuilding (IHB) companies from a mixed product architecture perspective. The study is part of a collaboration also involving three manufacturing companies and one IT provider. The research is crossing borders by means of interactive research and transdisciplinary engineering, and more than 50 practitioners and 13 researchers with competences in product management, engineering design, computational engineering, software development, production development, testing, quality, sourcing, and project management have been involved. Product platforms have been introduced in IHB to better control mixed product architectures and allow mass customization. Commonly, there is a technical platform for product architecture management, and a process platform for production management. High customization levels have resulted in an increasing number of variants not efficiently utilizing the technical platform. The results show that strong clients have negative influence on the technical platform while offering multiple products may facilitate simpler management of the technical platform but makes it more difficult to make changes and improvements.
The production preparation process (3P) enables collaboration between design and production engineers during product development but its efficiency is limited by the abundance of documentation of manufacturing constraints and capabilities. Empirical studies showed that use of production requirements can increase the efficiency of 3P, however, the support for production engineers to capture and share production requirements is scarce. A method to support production engineers in identifying, defining, structuring and sharing production requirements and collaborating with design engineers is presented. The method has three major parts - focus areas and requirement categories, a worksheet for production requirements capturing and prioritization, and a workflow for using the worksheet. The method was developed in collaboration with practitioners and contributes to the existing knowledge by providing production engineers with a structured way of working with production requirements. Evaluation of the method in the case company showed its usability when developing product variants and that additional work is needed to support the development of new product families and assembly lines.
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