Integrating Product Characteristics into Extended Value Stream Modeling

Product characteristics, e.g. the amount of material used or the number of parts, can have great influence on processing times, setup times, and lead times, as well as costs in production. Unfortunately, detailed information about interdependencies between the product and its production is often not available within the product development phase. Developers are not fully supported in considering the impacts of different design options on manufacturing objectives. This paper addresses the linkage of product and process design by proposing a value stream based modeling approach for manufacturing information. The approach is exemplarily applied on the manufacturing of PCB.