Vertical integration of supply chains has enabled industrialised house-building companies to develop and use product platforms. Constant changes in the external business environment, such as customer needs, legal requirements and demand fluctuations, continually compel companies to strategically align their product platforms with market position and offering accordingly. Achieving alignment is often hindered by a lack of understanding of the interplay between the external business environment, product platform, offering and market position. The knowledge on product platform alignment in this industry exists in the literature; however, a coherent description of product platform alignment is missing. The aim of this research was, therefore, to expand the knowledge on the strategic aspects of product platforms by describing product platform alignment in industrialised house building. Empirical data were collected in two Swedish companies producing timber-frame single-family houses. The developed model provides a coherent description of product platform alignment via five alignment modes that group interplays between product platform, business model and the external business environment, whereas identified challenges additionally enrich the description. Formalisation of the product platform knowledge and the changeability of manufacturing systems are identified as two main enablers of achieving product platform alignment.
The key driving factors in using humans and robots in collaborative applications for assembly processes are to reduce assembly time, cost and to improve the human working environment from an ergonomic viewpoint. Currently, there are limited automated procedures in assembly operations in house construction because the traditional type of assembly process depends entirely on manpower. This is common in the assembly process in different industries since assembly is one of the most demanding and intense manufacturing processes, and it is difficult to automate. This paper presents a case study on the implementation of human-robot collaboration for window assembly by way of an offline robot programming simulation. A self-adaptive software architecture that runs on a real-time target machine is also proposed for robotic window assembly. The window assembly method that will be used in this study is called “Click-In” and is manufactured by Fixture System Sweden AB. Apart from robot simulations, detailed suggestions are given for building a pilot cell for robot window assembly. The case study presented in this paper has both economical and ergonomic goals. The economic goal is to reduce the assembly time which will lead to an increase in window production. By introducing human-robot collaboration, operators do not need to perform uncomfortable assembly operations—rather the robot will perform these un-ergonomic operations. The feasibility of both goals is verified with offline robot programming simulation.
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