Responsive manufacturing

Citation

Gindy, N. (1998), "Responsive manufacturing", Assembly Automation, Vol. 18 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.1998.03318aaa.002

Responsive manufacturing

Responsive manufacturing

The author

Nabil Gindy is Professor of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Operations Management, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.

Overview

The major forces influencing today's manufacturing environments are already apparent: global competition; shortened product life cycle; increasing requirements for quality and reliability; faster-paced advances in increasingly complex technology, rapidly expanding options in materials and processes and increased unpredictability of surroundings. The ability of an enterprise to take advantage of rather than be destroyed by these forces is the key ingredient of any successful manufacturing strategy. In order to create the kind of radical transformational change that is required to respond to today's market challenges, a new strategic reorientation is needed.

In addition to the now mature manufacturing paradigms of flexible and lean manufacturing, many new ideas and concepts have recently been proposed for shaping the next generation of manufacturing systems. In spite of attracting much attention from industrial practitioners and academic researchers alike many of the new manufacturing paradigms are still in the process of being defined, and a more robust foundation to aid the transformation to the "factory of the future" is still to be defined. The overriding goal of the "manufacturing enterprise of the future", however, remains essentially unchanged. It has to achieve rapid, flexible and integrated development and manufacture of innovative products at a price the customer is prepared to pay. To thrive in the emerging market conditions it has to be capable of responding rapidly to market trends and operating as an efficient member of an extended and increasingly global supply network.

Manufacturing responsiveness relates to the ability of manufacturing systems to make a rapid and balanced response to the predictable and unpredictable changes that characterize today's manufacturing environments. The "responsive manufacturing enterprise", the enterprise that is able to thrive in the future, the world-class competitor, has to encompass new principles and modes of operation. Its strategic focus should be based on setting courses of action designed to achieve balance between stability under conditions of uncertainty and responsiveness to change. This critical balance of enterprise responses is designed on the one hand to allow the manufacturing enterprise to use its distinctive core competences to achieve continuous improvement, profitability and growth. On the other, it ensures enterprise success in coping with disturbances in its environment through its adaptability and change proficiency. To achieve this, the enterprise has to excel in seamlessly integrating, "gluing" together, its technological, organizational and human resources.

The responsive manufacturing enterprise has organizational characteristics which allow it to outperform competitors by excelling simultaneously in five domains:

• •

  product and process development; the adaptability of the enterprise to changes in its environment;

• •

  ability to deal with continuous change;

• •

  the balance of its response trader conditions of uncertainty; and

• •

  efficiency in operating as a smart partner in an extended and increasingly global supply network.

Workforce capabilities; the flexibility and intelligence of technology and reconfigurability of manufacturing systems; seamless integration of knowledge, internally between the functions within an enterprise, as well as between an enterprise and its partners in a supply network; and the utilization of communications technologies are all critical enablers towards achieving responsiveness.

In spite of the huge technological advances that have been made in assembly automation the majority of assembly tooling is still product specific. Relying on product-specific fixtures to provide part location and support during product assembly has the advantages of guaranteeing consistency, accuracy and quality but has the associated disadvantages of extremely high recurring costs, long lead times and inflexibility of product types and production volume. A move towards a philosophy of minimizing or eliminating product-specific tooling known as "jigless assembly" can therefore offer significant commercial advantages. Another area of great potential benefit is knowledge integration and reuse during the whole product development process from conceptual design to physical assembly of parts. Integrating and utilizing techniques and concepts such as feature-based design, assembly modelling, process capability description, tolerance analysis, measurement systems, in addition to the emerging flexible assembly technology, will have significant economic impact in the future.