Design of Manual Assembly Systems Focusing on Required Changeability

Due to fast moving markets in times of globalization, producing companies are nowadays faced with less predictable trends like fluctuations in sales volume or increasing product variety. In case of an occurring change the system has to be adjusted to the respective situation time- and cost-intensively. As a reaction, companies implement changeable production systems in terms of a strategic objective. The outstanding factor is the ability to adjust the system even outside of provided corridors of flexibility in a short period of time and with low investments. Designing a changeable production system, it is of particular interest to minimize the effort and complexity of the process itself. Additionally, the system has to be developed right to the predicted needs of changeability to decrease the investments to an adequate and economic level. Driven by this motivation, the paper deals with the process of designing a manual assembly system target-oriented to a specific potential change. To reach this goal, possible occurrences in defined dimensions of change (e. g. sales volume, product variety, delivery time) resulting from analyzed change drivers (e. g. market, customer, supplier) are met with change enabling system characteristics like mobility, modularity or scalability. In order to use the full potential of these characteristics, system elements (e. g. clamping fixture, hinge-joints) have to be designed accurately to the requirements of the potential change. For this reason, a method is shown which offers dynamic rankings of system elements to be designed, to support weighted system characteristics which are necessary to meet a potential change in a selected dimension. In this way a company is able to enhance its changeable production system and to benefit from its advantages. As an example of use, the method is applied to a planning process for a changeable assembly system in a German industrial company.