Engineering Change Orders influencing manufacturing start-ups in the automobile industry

摘要

Many companies, especially in high tech industries, are facing shrinking product lifecycles and increasingly complex production and product technologies. These market dynamics pressure production facilities to begin full scale operations at a point when the underlying process technology is still poorly understood. Consequently companies suffer from substantial yield losses which can dramatically affect the economics of the product, the production facility, and business. The production ramp-up will be defined as the time span equal to the difference between 'time- to- market' and' time- to- volume'. A major goal of innovators is to reduce the 'time-to-market', however they cannot evaluate the effects on the 'time-to-volume' When production is started at a point of low series production readiness a lot of engineering changes are likely to be detected during the ramp-up phase. This paper will compare two policies for the management of changes during production ramp-up.