Multi-variant Truck Production - Product Variety and its Impact on Production Quality in Manual Assembly

The trend of diversifying product portfolios increases the challenges for global manufactures to keep production processes robust and maintain high quality. Manufacturing trucks with high level of customization increases the vulnerability to quality deviations in the assembly process. By studying eight manual assembly stations, at a truck manufacturing plant, it was found that high product variety has negative impact on production quality and that high production complexity is connected to high product variety. The study also showed that if operators do not have proper information systems, with accurate data, they need to trust their own knowledge and skills. Results imply that more research is needed to address how the production of products with high variety can be handled to lower the exposure to quality deviations.