Risk analysis in manufacturing footprint decisions

A key aspect in the manufacturing footprint analysis is the risk and sensitivity analysis of critical parameters. In order to contribute to efficient industrial methods and tools for making well-founded strategic decisions regarding manufacturing footprint this paper aims to describe the main risks that need to be considered while locating manufacturing activities, and what risk mitigation techniques and strategies that are proper in order to deal with these risks. It is also proposed how the risk analysis should be included in the manufacturing location decision process

Production localization factors: an industrial and literature based review

Decision are commonly based on the available or easily accessible information; this is also true for more complex assessments like production localization. Where to locate production is often a key strategic decisions that has great impact on a company’s profitability for a long time; insufficient business intelligence may therefore have grave consequences. Six production localization factor studies have been assessed to see if they are focusing on the same issues and if there are any gaps. A new approach for structuring localization factors and the localization process is then presented and assessed with regards to some previously identified critical issues

Reconfigurable Manufacturing – An Enabler for a Production System Portfolio Approach

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how the development of a strategically integrated product and production system portfolio could be enabled by the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing. In previous research, several critical challenges related to developing production system portfolios have been identified, but it has not been investigated how developing a reconfigurable manufacturing concept could aid some of these. Therefore, through a multiple case study, these critical challenges have been investigated in two companies that have recently developed reconfigurable manufacturing concepts for multiple variants and generations of products. The findings reveal that the companies need to deal with several challenges in order to enable a functioning RMS. By running the project separately from the NPD project and to include several product types and production sites the company overcome several challenges

A New Method for Manufacturing Process Autonomous Planning in Intelligent Manufacturing System

This paper presents a new method for autonomous computer-aided process planning (A-CAPP) in an intelligent manufacturing system, in which the related input and output of the system are discussed on the basis of comparative analysis of traditional CAPP. The crucial functional components of the A-CAPP system, such as event scheduling management, manufacturing process planning, operation process/step planning, numerical control machining program planning, process simulation and evaluation, are introduced; and the methods of process knowledge management, including process feature knowledge, manufacturing resource knowledge and process method knowledge, are discussed as well. A-CAPP applied for intelligent manufacturing system can effectively support the production line reconstruction dynamically; shorten the time of production line configuration modification in accordance with customers’ requirement change or market requirement fluctuation, and furthermore to balance the production lines load