Manufacturing PDF

One of the most important aspects of the product development process is to develop an understanding of the true needs of the customer that must be satisfied by the design. While fine in principle, this understanding is very difficult to achieve in practice, as there is usually not a one-to-one correlation between the stated needs of the customer and the corresponding requirements that the design must satisfy. Accordingly, great effort must be made by product designers to translate the needs and desires of the customer into appropriate functional requirements and constraints for the design. Because customer needs often change during the product development cycle, the requirements of the design may change dynamically. For a design to be a success, therefore, it is vitally important for designers to understand the impact of changing customer needs on the design requirements.

There are ever increasing pressures on companies to improve the quality of their products whilst reducing both costs and the time it takes to deliver products to customers.Traditional Concurrent Engineering approaches have been widely used by organizations to improve their business processes -resulting in reduced costs and shortened lead times. More recently, the idea of Three Dimensional Concurrent Engineering has been proposed: arguing for the parallel consideration of supply chain issues as well as those related to product and process. Three Dimensional Concurrent Engineering leads to a need for a supply chain design process which, in turn, requires tools to support the process. The research reported here was an early investigation into the feasibility of using axiomatic design theory to support a supply chain design process.

In this paper, we are to present a practical application of Axiomatic Design (AD) methodology as a roadmap to lean production, in a car body assembly line. In addition to product development, AD has already been applied for manufacturing system design but we tend to expand its application to production system design, which besides manufacturing includes all activities required to satisfy customer needs. AD theory provides a framework to simplify the whole problem. According to the AD principles, a hierarchical structure for conceptualization of lean philosophy has been developed. This structure originates in lean manufacturing principles.

Early consideration of manufacturing system issues in a product development process prevents excessive product design iterations due to a failure to recognize manufacturing system constraints, as well as unnecessary manufacturing system design modification to accommodate new product designs. A structured approach to understand the interaction between product design decisions and manufacturing system design is essential to make this early consideration possible and thus, is a key for successful new product launch. In this paper, an approach to capture the interactions between manufacturing system design and product design decisions will be discussed. As a basis of the proposed approach, the manufacturing system design decomposition (MSDD) is applied. The MSDD represents a logical functional decomposition of general objectives of a manufacturing system and adopts the concept of the Axiomatic Design theory [Suh, 1990, 2001]. The use of the MSDD helps product development teams to see how their decisions affect the achievement of the manufacturing system objectives and thus, to make a right decision from the early stage of product development.

International Journal of Production Research, 2000.
Systematic design and evaluation of segmented production system structures is subject of this paper. Recently emerged paradigms of Lean Management and Business Process Reengineering call for adaptation of production system’s organizational structure to be more reactive to a volatile and diversified market behavior. One opportunity to optimize production system design is segmentation of the manufacturing enterprise into small, flexible and decentralized production units. The presented segmentation procedure utilizes an Axiomatic Design framework and supports Lean Management practices following strategic, organizational, and technological design aspects. A case study exemplifies the developed methodology to improve competitiveness of a manufacturing company.

Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development, MIT, Cambridge, MA, November 1996.
This paper introduces the use of axiomatic design in the design of manufacturing systems. The two primary functional requirements of any manufacturing system are developed. These functional requirements are used to analyze the design of four manufacturing systems in terms of system performance. The purpose of this work is to provide a new foundation for describing, determining and rationalizing the design of any new manufacturing system.

Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development, MIT, Cambridge, MA, November 1996.
The design and evaluation of manufacturing system design is the subject of this paper. Though much attention has been given to the design of manufacturing systems, in practice most efforts still remain empirically-based. Numerous idioms have been used in the attempt to describe the operation of manufacturing systems. When a company tries to become “lean” or wants to increase the production and become more efficient, the company will start to introduce numerous concepts developed by Toyota and others. The problem is that a company does not know the order in which to implement the lean changes or why they should implement what they are implementing. This approach greatly slows manufacturing improvements when complementary or contradictive concepts are introduced on an ad-hoc basis. In this paper, a sequence of implementation steps will be developed through the application of axiomatic design. This sequence will provide a design methodology for lean production which connects manufacturing system design objectives to operation design parameters. This paper will use the methodology developed to improve manufacturing processes in two different companies.