European assembly - status report

Citation

Onori L., M. and Barata, J. (2003), "European assembly - status report", Assembly Automation, Vol. 23 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.2003.03323aaa.002

European assembly - status report

European assembly - status report

M. Onori L.M. Camarinha-Matos and J. Barata

Keywords: Assembly, Europe, Assembly Net, R&D, Manufacturing

The interest in assembly research and development work, whether industrial or academic, has been in steady decline since the early 1990s in Europe. Whatever the reasons may be, this decline in interest has had a major influence on European industry, and will most probably have a very dramatic impact on its future. These observations were underlined throughout the first year of meetings and workshops carried out within the assembly net thematic network [1] (www.assembly-net.org) on precision assembly. One of the actions taken was to produce a roadmap for European precision assembly, in an attempt to define a vision and clarify the coming opportunities, threats, and what the future R&D requirements would be. Some conclusions will be briefly detailed in this article.

One of the main issues arising out of the discussions conducted at several assembly net meetings is the lack of understanding of the assembly process itself. Basically, the number, range and diversity of sub-processes within assembly is enormous and dependent on the product type and size. No serious efforts have ever been made to clearly structure any of these assembly processes, which implies that no scientifically validated process knowledge is ever exploited during the product lifecycle. Assembly being a multi-disciplinary area, such process knowledge is fundamental, and affects the optimisation of the product design, eco-sustainability, supply-chain, and the processes themselves. Since most of the assembly process knowledge is held by the shop-floor operators, there are some threats/trends that could worsen this scenario considerably.

One of these trends is outsourcing, a strategy used to curb costs and focus on what companies call "core competencies". Recent surveys, however, show that this trend critically weakens the process knowledge know-how at the original company. This trend has led to a flourishing business for "contract manufacturers": companies that offer to produce part, or entire ranges of products. If most of the contract manufacturers were European, this problem could be reduced. The problem is that the most successful contract manufacturers are NOT European (Roberts, 2002) and that almost all of these actors actually perform the assembly tasks in low-wage, non-western countries that do not abide by the same social and environmental protection principles (Figures 1 and 2).

What basically happens is that a major company outsources manufacturing and most of its assembly to a specialised contract manufacturer. However, most implications of outsourcing, such as cost/benefit analyses, logistic costs, floating stocks, WIP aspects, have not been well documented. The hidden danger is that the original company is basically outsourcing its process knowledge. This has been well pointed out in some of the literature (Weber, 2002). Note that the contract manufacturers' final intention is to make a wider contribution to the whole process: from product design (!) to manufacturing execution. These practices often lead to a gradual process knowledge breakdown at the original company, which, in time, leads to a loss of product know-how, market shares, etc. (Buetow, 2002). Furthermore, an excessive focus on core competencies, when too narrow, represents another potential danger: in turbulent markets it may reduce the capacity of the company to rapidly adapt to different business processes.

Figure 1 The 15 leading contract manufacturers worldwide (Roberts, 2002)

Figure 2 No. of Robots (percentage distribution) within Assembly, 1999 (World Industrial Robots, 1999)

Another interesting issue here is that by outsourcing assembly, the original company transfers all the problems associated with assembly to the contract manufacturer. The problems are therefore not solved but simply passed on. The contract manufacturer will, sooner or later, incur the same problems with assembly. To date, the contract manufacturers have solved this by manually assembling the "problem products" in low-wage countries. This not only means that valuable assembly process knowledge is being exported, but that when mini and micro products finally reach the market, the original problems will be greatly amplified. Without conventional assembly process knowledge, but with all the problems associated with assembly and those linked to automation, it will become very difficult to solve the problems.

The problems mentioned above become very apparent when considering the link between product design and the production phase. Product design and production system design (or re-configuration) are two phases that, despite the major efforts made in recent years, still denote a very weak link. Current DFA tools basically lack robust, structured assembly process models. Such process models could enable product designers to understand the implications their designs have on the assembly system selection during the product design phase itself (Sandin and Onori, 2002). Some of these aspects have been also discussed in the context of Concurrent Engineering, but more focused on the collaborative environments and basically ignoring the production itself. The integration of different design methods into a single tool has already been identified as an area of concern outside Europe (Cho and Hsu, 1997). A clear product-assembly system design link aspect is the growing need to facilitate the placement of the orders within final assembly. The main objective here is to create the final product identity as late as possible. It is, therefore, of vital importance to simplify final assembly as much as possible. This weak link will become a huge problem in the future since, as products get smaller, the process details will become even less visible, and the original problems will be greatly magnified. The differences denoted in company strategies illustrate this: Alcatel and Ericsson have not integrated DFA and DFM techniques to a large extent, whereas NOKIA and SONY have.

Unfortunately, the problems do not stop at this level. Other aspects that raise concern include the low re-usability of the assembly equipment, the advent of virtual enterprising techniques (i.e. distributed collaborative manufacturing), the lack of disassembly knowledge, inadequate cost/benefit evaluation models and social and educational issues.

The issue of low re-usability of assembly equipment is a well-known fact and decades of research have not yet yielded adequately "agile" or "flexible" solutions. The R&D community has either attempted to develop extremely flexible assembly systems (flexible automatic assembly (FAA)) or focused on the standardisation and modularisation of high-volume manual assembly lines. Unfortunately, this existing paradigm of highly flexible assembly systems still prevails and results in expensive, highly technological solutions which:

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  cannot easily fit into existing production facilities,

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  rarely accommodate an analysis of the product design implications,

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  require technological competence, and

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  are seldom able to assemble more than one product generation.

With the result that they are adequate for many different product types, but fail to perform well in any single domain. Rather than flexibility in the traditional sense, what is really needed are systems that may easily evolve with the product, market, and technological changes that a company goes through (Onori, 2002).

Disassembly and recycling are topics of growing industrial significance primarily due to environmental, but also political issues. Terms such as eco-sustainability and reversed assembly systems are examples of the emerging social and welfare requirements and subsequent taxonomy being formed. The research in this field has gained momentum but cannot be deemed sufficient in relation to the growing demands. In terms of life-cycle engineering, disassembly technologies must be considered as part of the original product design and greater knowledge acquisition is required. Furthermore, mini and micro products will create the need for new disassembly processes.

The recent evolutions in market conditions are forcing production companies to adopt new organisational and production paradigms. Departing from the traditional outsourcing model, new forms of distributed manufacturing focused on collaboration emerge. This trend is facilitated by the advances made in the last decades in terms of cooperation models and support infrastructures (Camarinha-Matos, 2002). Virtual enterprises (VE) and virtual organisations (VO) are examples of cooperative structures created to cope with these aspects. The area of VE is, particularly, active in Europe, not only in terms of research and development, but also in terms of the emergence of various forms of enterprise networking and advanced clustering at regional levels. Production companies that intend to join these networked structures need to have highly adaptable shop floors (shop floor agility) in order to cope with the requirements imposed by these very dynamic and unpredictable changes. Basically, shop-floor agility implies an increasing level of re-engineering activity (Barata and Camarinha-Matos, 2002). Most of the re-engineering work done in the past relates to the organisational aspects of VE, namely on how to create IT infrastructures to support the VE life-cycle. However, much less work is being done on how to connect producing companies to VEs. The problems associated with integrating a production system into the VE world differ from those of integrating any other type of company (service company, for instance) because of the following reasons:

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  The production system must be agile (easily adapted) to varying business opportunities.

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  Remote supervision mechanisms are required to support a controlled "intrusion" of other partner(s).

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  Simulation tools, to verify if the consortium being created answers the requirements, are required.

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  It is necessary to structure the actual processes behind the VE business opportunity.

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  Legacy systems must be effectively integrated. It is necessary to cope with technologies/tools with different life-cycles and at different stages of their life-cycle. New interoperability methods and mechanisms are needed.

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  There is a need to integrate different enterprise cultures.

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  Considering that these issues are already problematic in traditional vertical enterprises, these challenges will be far greater in distributed and dynamic environments.

The agility and dynamism required for networked organizations is limited by the process of trust building. Even if flexible support infrastructures become widely available, the aspects of trust building, and the required reorganization at the enterprise level, are hard to cope with in cooperative business processes. "Trusting your partner" is a gradual and long process. The definition of "business rules", contracts for VE/VO, or even common ontologies also take time, especially when different business cultures are involved. The creation of long term clusters of enterprises represent an approach to overcome these obstacles and can support the rapid formation of VE/VO according to the business opportunities. Although geography, due to computer networking, is no longer a barrier, clusters are commonly formed within a given region. The development of even better communication infrastructures will broaden the geographical realms of such long- term associations. Cultural ties, in particular human relationships, are also motivating factors to form such associations which, in fact, represent VE breeding environments. An interesting example is given by Virtuelle Fabrik network in Switzerland and Southern Germany. Understanding the operating principles and best practices of such organizations, in the area of assembly, and providing them with appropriate management tools requires urgent further research.

Risks and uncertainties associated with selecting the correct assembly system for a given product/product family are connected to the lack of efficient investment/cost analysis models. Selecting the most adequate assembly system approach and actors in a distributed environment is a complex matter due to the fact that the factors influencing the choice are many and not all well defined. These may include cost, complexity, labour agreements, legal issues, safety, logistics, market volatility aspects and many more. Furthermore, in order to better understand and control the cost mechanisms that affect assembly, there is an urgent need to create and apply assembly performance tracking tools throughout the product lifecycle. These issues are to be addressed immediately, since the real costs of outsourcing cannot, at present, be realistically forecasted against the costs of automating. This is also an urgent need in the context of VEs in order to clearly measure the incremental value added by each member in the assembly value chain.

Finally, there are serious social and educational issues associated with European assembly that need to be addressed. Since most contract manufacturers are non-European, the range and size of employment opportunities being lost due to outsourcing is considerable. On the long-term, it is envisaged that entire market segments will be lost. The rapid decline in labour force and the resulting narrowing of the skill base has been well defined (Low Fertility, Families and Public Policies, 2000) and constitutes a major challenge for all sectors of the society in Europe. As a result, the industry will increasingly have to rely upon cost-effective automation technologies which, combined with product miniaturisation, clearly underlines the importance of developing new methods, standards and commercially applicable solutions for precision assembly. Biology, physics, and chemistry knowledge, in parallel with a strong education on IT and industrial sociology, should be integrated within given courses. As a result, there is a need for a concerted effort to develop new academic courses and training initiatives based on closer cooperation between academia and industry.

One of the key challenges, as identified by the EC organized workshops in materials and nanotechnology research, has been the achieving of "sustainable competitiveness" as an overriding system approach to new methods of production. However, it seems quite clear that market dominance in nano technologies, products and their production systems will not save the European Union from serious social and economical problems. This is primarily due to the fact that the transition from macro to nano products will not occur overnight. Moreover, micro and nano products will not exist as purely independent entities but, rather, as parts of larger products that still require some macro assembly. Therefore, the societies that intend to support the development of world-class micro and nano technologies will have to rely, in order to succeed, upon the adaptation of existing production constraints and infrastructures to the new market demands. Furthermore, it is a reliable forecast to predict that, for the next 20 or 30 years, conventional production will still remain the backbone of European industry.

To meet these challenges there is a need for a large-scale effort for the development of new business strategies, production methods, underlining technologies, and formal methods and theories to allow cost effective and sustainable production of ultra precision products. There is also a very urgent need for wider and closer collaboration between European technology and equipment vendors, system integrators, end users, and educational institutions.

Note

1. EU Growth Thematic Network on Precision Assembly Technologies for Mini and Micro Products (Assembly-Net, EU GIRT-CT-2001-05039).