Many Danish manufacturing companies are experiencing an ever increasing competitive pressure to handle more product variety inducing more complexity into products and manufacturing. This is combined with a demand for shorter product life cycles, more frequent product introductions, and shorter time to market. Although a challenge, being able to efficiently address this challenge can prove a significant competitive edge to companies. The purpose of this project is to enable Danish manufacturers to address the challenges above, using reconfigurable and platform based manufacturing systems.

Reconfigurable manufacturing is s new type of manufacturing systems that are designed for both efficient operations, and fast and efficient introduction of new products, capacity changes, and changeovers. This is achieved by systematic design based on modular manufacturing equipment and a close coordination between product platforms and manufacturing system platforms. When Danish companies develop manufacturing systems today, they are often designed as dedicated solutions, able to manufacture exactly a very specific range of products and variants in a volume expected to meet the market demand in the future. However, as markets become more unpredictable and product life cycles shorten, these systems become insufficient at a faster pace. The result of this is often expensive and time consuming rebuilds of current manufacturing systems or establishing even more new dedicated systems that are underutilized, implying that companies choose between having insufficient capacity, leading to lost sales, or surplus capacity, implying excessive capacity costs. Previous research has found that in some cases, capacity costs can be reduced by as much as 50% by developing reconfigurable manufacturing systems rather than dedicated systems, while still meeting market demands in an unpredictable and volatile market.

This project extends the research results withing reconfigurable, modular, and platform based manufacturing in previous projects with both AAU, SDU, and TI have been partners. However, in previous projects single companies have been targeted, where this project will focus on generalizing and disseminating these findings to a much broader range of companies in Danish industry. The findings from these previous projects thus serve as an input for this project, as well as a mapping of the current best practice in industry, which will be incorporated into the proposed method and tools. All of these findings are matured and consolidated through seven pilot projects focusing on developing reconfigurable manufacturing systems in the companies. The outcome of this is a well proven development method and a toolbox for context specific development of reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Objectives 

Danish companies are increasingly required to increase product variety and complexity in products and manufacturing. This is combined with a competitive pressure to reduce time-to-market and smaller batch sizes, which all stresses the importance of changeability. The objective of this project is to:
Enable Danish companies to meet these requirements through development of reconfigurable and platform based manufacturing
This objective will be met by:

Consolidating research contributions and industry best practice into toolbox and method for developing reconfigurable manufacturing
Testing and maturing toolbox in pilot projects
Disseminating the knowledge broadly in Danish Industry.

Work pagages 

Phase 1:

Development of tool for establishing reconfigurable and platform based manufacturing. Methods and tools for development of reconfigurable manufacturing in companies are established. Seven pilot companies take part in pilot projects, which provide a testing and maturing environment for the development of methods, and provide cases for other companies to be used in the subsequent activities. Booklets and videos are produced as learning materials for masterclasses attended by new companies in phase 2.

Phase 2:

Dissemination and broad implementation of methods and tools
Based on knowledge and experience from phase one, three parallel dissemination and implementation runs are done, each of six month duration. In the implementation runs, 30 companies will be introduced and taught the new development methods and corresponding tools. The 30 companies will apart from that participate in company-context specific projects, that will be supported by advisors from the project. A concluding conference will further disseminate the knowledge from the project to even more Danish manufacturing companies.