Bridging the Gap between High and Low-volume Production through Enhancement of Integrative Capabilities

Today-more than earlier-value creation, competitiveness and sustainable growth are dependent on development and utilization of new technology. New technologies enable new ways to develop products and production systems and may improve infrastructure for sharing information. These new technologies bridge the gap between production systems, function and design - and hence between high-volume and low-volume production. For manufacturing companies this represents a true paradigm shift referred to as Industry 4.0. Within this emerging endeavour, organizational learning and social and technical skills become increasingly important to enable faster and leaner operations. In this article, prior art of integrated processes, tools and guidelines for design has been studied. This will be seen in connection with how a company that operates in Norway have succeeded with developing an automated assembly solution for a large and complex product produced in low-volume by re-designing the product and its automated production process in parallel; i.e. a manufacturing context that is usually regarded as difficult to automate in an economical way. As automation knowledge within the company was limited, capabilities have been developed and demonstrated together with selected research partners in a technology project named Autoflex. According to our findings, to sustain competitive within a rapidly changing industry is dependent on, 1) a company's ability to absorb new technologies and provide flexibility within work environment-production system to maximize capacity utilization; 2) processes that facilitates team-work and iterative product and process development; 3) supporting tools such as design guidelines for sharing knowledge between production and product engineering. As a result, companies that succeed in enhancing their integrative capabilities will gain competitive advantage long term.