Lean Manual Assembly 4.0: A Systematic Review

Abstract

In a demand context of mass customization, shifting towards the mass personalization of products, assembly operations face the trade-off between highly productive automated systems and flexible manual operators. Novel digital technologies—conceptualized as Industry 4.0—suggest the possibility of simultaneously achieving superior productivity and flexibility. This article aims to address how Industry 4.0 technologies could improve the productivity, flexibility and quality of assembly operations. A systematic literature review was carried out, including 234 peer-reviewed articles from 2010–2020. As a result, the analysis was structured addressing four sets of research questions regarding (1) assembly for mass customization; (2) Industry 4.0 and performance evaluation; (3) Lean production as a starting point for smart factories, and (4) the implications of Industry 4.0 for people in assembly operations. It was found that mass customization brings great complexity that needs to be addressed at different levels from a holistic point of view; that Industry 4.0 offers powerful tools to achieve superior productivity and flexibility in assembly; that Lean is a great starting point for implementing such changes; and that people need to be considered central to Assembly 4.0. Developing methodologies for implementing Industry 4.0 to achieve specific business goals remains an open research topic.

Employees' Digital Competency Development in the Construction and Automotive Industrial Sectors

“…Currently, many research papers focus on the impact of digital transformation on the quality and productivity of production processes (Craveiro et al, 2019), the technical aspects of business development (Oesterreich & Teuteberg, 2016), the changing business model (Miqueo et al, 2020;Witschel et al, 2019), and the workforce and organisational structure (De Soto et al, 2019) in different industries. Therefore, digital transformation may be defined as a process of converting the main part of companies' business operations to online or otherwise computerised mediums, which often takes a long time and is not possible to finish fully because of the ongoing expansion of new digital technologies (Levit, 2018).…”

Towards an Assembly Support System with Dynamic Bayesian Network

“…Even though repetitive or dangerous actions and operations are becoming automated, the human workers are not removed entirely from the manufacturing process. To keep the human and the manual assembly operations in line with the digitalization of the industry, new concepts, such as Operator 4.0 [1], Healthy Operator 4.0 [2], or Assembly 4.0 [3,4], emerged. Operators are gaining new responsibilities and are helped in the process by continuous training or by receiving real-time support with the help of devices such as smart glasses and augmented reality technology [5][6][7].…”

PDCA 4.0: A New Conceptual Approach for Continuous Improvement in the Industry 4.0 Paradigm

“…Approaching LM in its purest form does not require information technology [7]. However, both LM and I4.0 paradigms aim to solve present and future challenges in manufacturing [8].…”