One is the magic number
27 March 2018
Standardisation of products means many end users aren’t getting what they want at a competitive price. Is single piece flow, or ‘batch size 1’, the solution to this problem? Lenze’s Michael Sachpekidis reveals three broad areas that can help manufacturers efficiently manufacture products that are effectively unique.
Since the dawn of the age of mass production, manufacturers and the users of their products have wrestled with a big compromise. On one side, production systems tend to work best when conditions are highly standardised, with identical products, identical processes and tight control over variation. This standardisation helps manufacturers capture economies of scale in purchasing, and achieve high – and continually rising – levels of productivity on the shop floor.
On the other side, every user is unique. One user’s requirements, operating conditions and use-case for a product may be significantly different to another’s, so their “ideal” versions of that product may be significantly different too. Traditionally, that trade-off comes with a price. Users either have to accept a product that is “nearly” right for them or pay a premium to get a non-standard item that does the job better. Alternatively, manufacturers have to find ways to give more of their users more appropriate products. Often, that entails the use of buffer stocks to separate supply and demand. Product variants are built in identical batches, and users pick their preferred option from the range on offer. That works, up to a point, but somebody has to bear the cost of all that extra inventory and manufacturing complexity.
The advent of lean production, pioneered by Toyota in post-war Japan, drove a fundamental change in thinking. Lean companies seek to eliminate waste in all its forms from their processes. And they see excess inventory as an important source of waste. To reduce it, these companies design their production processes to allow fast changeovers between product variants. Techniques such as Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) allow them to reconfigure their production lines extremely rapidly, so they can make any product variant in any sequence. That approach became known as “single piece flow”.
From variety to infinity
The original lean production systems transformed both the efficiency and the flexibility of production, but they still had significant limitations. These techniques only worked because manufacturers kept a tight limit on the number of product variants they offered. That helped them keep cost and complexity under control, minimising the number of changes required between one product and the next.
For many companies today, a handful of variants is no longer sufficient. Products have become more sophisticated, more complex and more capable, but users have become more exacting too. Especially in business-to-business markets, they want solutions that meet their requirements precisely, or which have unique capabilities that help provide an edge over competitors. That trend is driving a transition from mass production to mass customisation, forcing manufacturers to find ways to efficiently manufacture products that are effectively unique.
There’s no single strategy that allows manufacturers to achieve “batch size one” without adding excessive manufacturing cost. Doing that requires attention to the complete value chain, from product design and sourcing to production, logistics and sales. But the emergence of Industry 4.0 technologies is providing companies with powerful new ways to achieve their flexibility goals. In particular, there are three broad areas where technology and new approaches are making a big difference.
Modularisation
Assembling product designs and manufacturing systems from modular units allows organisations to achieve the best-of-both worlds. Standardising at the module level provides control, simplicity and economies of scale. And bringing modules together in different combinations, or combining them with a small number of truly bespoke components, allows the creation of highly customised products. Car manufacturers have used modularisation strategies to dramatically diversify their portfolios in recent years, while keeping tight control over their costs. In our market – industrial automation – we use modular approaches to offer customers a wide range of motion solutions while keeping lead times short and prices competitive. And our customers in turn are increasingly adopting modular designs to rapidly develop and deploy sophisticated machines that meet their end user’s needs.
Hardware to software transition
Implementing features in software rather than hardware can transform flexibility. In products, software features can be switched on or off with little impact on manufacturing cost. And new or improved features can be added throughout the product lifecycle, even when products are already in service with users. Advances in software development techniques mean the software is becoming increasingly modular too, with standard interfaces allowing companies to rapidly assemble sophisticated software applications from standardised, proven blocks of code.
In manufacturing operations, many capabilities that once relied on fixed hardware can now be implemented in software too. Adding additional motion axes to manufacturing machines allows them to work on a wider range of product variants, and to reconfigure themselves between cycles to produce unique components. CNC machining and additive manufacturing processes can reduce or eliminate the requirement for moulds and other fixed tooling, reducing the cost of producing different component configurations and eliminating changeovers between variants.
Integration
The most important element of Industry 4.0 is not provided by the capabilities of individual machines, however. The use of open network standards and fast, low communications technologies allows those machines to work together much more effectively. Horizontal communication between machines is a key enabler for mass customisation, allowing production systems to adapt their behaviour automatically to the requirements of different products and variants.
If horizontal integration between machines is powerful, vertical integration is transformative. By connecting their front-line production assets to wider enterprise networks, or to cloud-based systems that can share information across site or corporate boundaries, companies can manage complexity in new ways. Automating the links between sales, procurement and manufacturing activities allows companies to coordinate complex flows of materials through their processes. High-level dashboards can reveal capacity constraints and bottlenecks, and help companies to identify pockets of spare capacity they can use to meet unique user requirements.
Batches of one, mass customisation and single piece flow will not be the best solution for every product or every production process. In the future, most manufacturers will need to find a balance, pursuing economies of scale and standardisation where they can, and differentiating where doing so adds real value. Digital technologies and Industry 4.0 are changing the rules of the game, however, providing new ways to manage complexity and add flexibility in production.
Contact Details and Archive...