To compete, manufacturing companies need production systems that quickly can respond to changes. To handle change drivers such as volume variations or new product variants, reconfigurability is advocated as a competitive means. This implies an ability to add, remove, and/or rearrange the structure of the production system to be ready for future changes. Still, it is not clear how the production system design process can capture and support the de-sign of reconfigurable production systems. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to increase the knowledge of how to support the design of reconfig-urable production systems. Reconfigurability could be defined by a number of reconfigurability char-acteristics including convertibility, scalability, automatibility, mobility, modularity, integrability, and diagnosability. In eight case studies, reconfigu-rability characteristics in production system design were studied in order to investigate reconfigurability needs, knowledge, and practice in manufactur-ing companies. In three of the case studies reconfigurable production sys-tems were studied to identify the links between change drivers and reconfig-urability characteristics. In the remaining five case studies, reconfigurability in the production system design processes was addressed in terms of needs, prerequisites, and consideration. Based on the literature review and the case studies, support for reconfigu-rable production system design is suggested including two parts. The first part comprises support for analyzing the need for reconfigurability. Based on relevant change drivers the need for reconfigurability must be identified to enable selection of right type and degree of reconfigurability for each specif-ic case of application. A comprehensive view of the reconfigurability charac-teristics is presented and links between change drivers and reconfigurability characteristics are described. The characteristics are divided into critical characteristics, that lead to a capacity or functionality change of the produc-tion system, and supporting characteristics, that reduce system reconfigura-tion time but do not necessarily lead to a modification of functionality or capacity of the production system. The second part provides support in how to consider reconfigurability in the production system design process. A holistic perspective is crucial to design reconfigurable production systems and therefore constituent parts of a production system are described. Accord-ing to their character physical, logical, and human reconfiguration must be considered through the whole production system design process.

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The Production Manager at Atlas Copco AB Craelius wants to adopt a lean approach to become more competitive. This thesis is an exploratory study of the subject and what it means for the business activity and its implementation process. The objective is to provide a basic understanding of lean to the company, and what this means for Atlas Copco AB Craelius. The report describes the industrial revolution in brief. This is because the company itself must understand where certain ways of looking at production management is derived from. Furthermore, it provides an understanding of Lean's origins. The report describes lean principles and outline, some of the lean tools and methods as well as what these mean for Atlas Copco Craelius AB. The focus of the report is on education and the importance of management's knowledge and understanding of the subject. At the end of the report an adequate but overall implementation program is presented as well as a few examples of possible improvements. The thesis is based on a basic literature review of production management and lean. To get a general understanding of the business, I studied the assembly for a few days, talked to the staff, participated in the daily pulse meetings and participated in the production office Friday meetings. I did a study at Atlas Copco Tools AB to learn how they managed the implementation of lean there. Furthermore, personal experience from previous training, work and study has influenced the report.

Abstracts This is a low-margin era. Even in this situation, enterprises still need to get their profits.Likewise, this is a competitive times. Even in this critical moment, enterprises still cannot be obsolete behind the time. Enterprises have to earn their profits and survive in this crucial world by enhancing their competitiveness. What is ¡§competitiveness¡¨? We can simply define it as an ability to exceed the other rivals. Especially in this trend of globalization, networking, and technology, what a difficult for an enterprise to pursuit its prospects and set up an everlasting foundation. For recent 30 years, no one can deny that Taiwan is used to be a center of making. But, since 1997 the beginning of third glasnost in China,China already replaced the original Taiwan¡¥s global making role gradually. Just like the waves toward the east coast, from traditional to hi-tech industries all are shifted to Mainland China for investment. Obviously, Taiwan is no longer a fertile soil for production. If Taiwan¡¦ s existent firms cannot be upgraded to the higher managerial strategy, they are going to lose their competitiveness in worldwide markets. Nevertheless, is it easier to manage a firm in China than in Taiwan? Can we simply just adopt the same ways and old model used in Taiwan to manage the Chinese people? The answer is so plain; we can see some Taiwan businessmen retreated from China and South-east Asia for pool management. Most of outgoing Taiwan businesses is still making their main profits from production. However, a globalization enterprise equals to enter or even to activate the battlefield for the local and international opponents. Thus, the labor management needs to be localization per the native culture; take refer to the local environment to melt the culture and management together. It is to say, implementing the new managerial model becomes the first lesson for the outgoing enterprises. The case we studied here is a Taiwan businessman went to China for investment 3 years ago. Eventually, he realized that himself was behind his fellow companies. If he cannot make any changes for living, he will soon be superannuated from the markets. Therefore, he aggressively makes a firm decision to utilize the New Production System (NPS) for promoting the competence of production, and finally achieve his goal at the end. The purposes of this research are meant to reach the following targets: 1. To introduce the characteristics, contents, the processes and result of NPS for necessary enterprises. 2. To induce the supplemental tools of NPS: the design, application and administration of performance rewards. Meanwhile, to prove the efficacy of these implements. 3. The insufficiency of this study may lead to further discussion and research for scholastic academia 4. Thru the conclusion we made per this study, we can firmly verify the NPS and performance rewards; these managerial tools can stimulate the spark of innovational management. (P. 60 conclusion). This study derives the ideas from the local and foreign papers to set up the conceptual structure for NPS. 1. The trend from the mass production to elastic production. 2. Organizational change-----the necessity of organizational re-structuring. 3. The compliant implications of efficiency between the individual and team performance rewards, then focus on the real case study. In the case study, we describe the history of this company, the globalization background and the office culture in China. At the same time, we also mention the layout of NPS, the momentum to drive the project, the result of outcomes, the faced problems, and the factors for success in details. To sum up, we can briefly induce 4 points as our ending from this study: 1. NPS forms the aggressiveness, responsibility, open, cooperation, and well communication in organizational ¡§character¡§. Also, the human is the center idea of the enterprise culture as well. 2. From the aspect of production, NPS get a rather positive influence on product quality, production circle, field management and the staff stability. 3. Sound and equal rewards system should combine reasonable calculation and evaluation system for assessing individual and group efficiency. If valued rewards are used to motivate, they can result in the exertion of effort to achieve high levels of performance. 4. NPS is a useful managerial tool and production technology for all shapes and sizes in the varied industries. .

This thesis describes a throughput-based technique for identifying the bottleneck of a production system using discrete-event simulation. Most literature defines a bottleneck as being a workstation that has the largest impact on reducing the throughput of a system. However, when identifying a bottleneck using discrete-event simulation, throughput is rarely considered as the parameter of interest. Instead, parameters like percentage utilization and waiting time in an upstream buffer are considered. The technique suggested in this thesis identifies the bottleneck as being the workstation that causes the largest drop in throughput if added to a system. The technique is explained and tested on four different shoploor arrangements of workstations (serial, job split, conditional branching, and a feedback/rework production line). This demonstrates that the throughput-based technique can be used in most any shoploor arrangement of workstations and eliminates some of the drawbacks of the other more commonly used bottleneck identification methods, such as percentage utilization and waiting time in queue. A major failure of the percentage utilization technique in identifying system bottlenecks is seen in systems that have static and dynamic resources. However, the throughput-based technique correctly identifies the bottleneck of such systems.

Estágio realizado na Bosch Portugal, S. A. e orientado pelo Eng.º Nelson Ré / Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Mecânica. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2009

Estágio realizado na Bosch Termotecnologia, S.A / Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Industrial e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2009

No description available.

In a market environment that is subject to continuous changes, companies need to adapttheir production systems in order to maintain the competitive edge. Current literatureshows that with a successful production system design, higher levels of output, eciencyand quality can be achieved.However, designing a production system is done infrequently and therefore tends tolack experience. As a result, design decisions have to be made under uncertainty due toa lack of information, structure and knowledge. In fact, the success of a design process isdirectly linked to the level of uncertainty.The purpose of this thesis is to reduce uncertainty in production system design throughDiscrete Event Simulation before an assembly system is implemented. Therefore, a theoreticalstudy was carried out dening types and sources of uncertainty in productionsystem design. Parallel to the theoretical study, a case study in Volvo ConstructionEquipment Operations Hallsberg was conducted. Discrete Event Simulation was testedas a tool to reduce uncertainty in production system design.The analysis illustrates the observed sources of uncertainty in production systemdesign cover a process, organizational, corporate, market and cultural context.The relevant uncertainty types identied in the case study in Volvo ConstructionEquipment Operations Hallsberg were environmental, system, technical, structural,temporal, lack of knowledge and lack of information. The information providedby the Discrete Event Simulation in order to reduce uncertainty are in form ofKPIs, process structure and visualization. The provided information had a positiveimpact on the degree of technical uncertainties, the lack of knowledge and thelack of information. As a result, the level of uncertainty in the Volvo ConstructionEquipment Operations Hallsberg future line designing process was reduced.

Estágio realizado na General Electric e orientado pelo Eng.º João Gonçalves / Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Industrial e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010