Assessment of the product based time expanding effect

摘要

One consequence of the increasing number of variants per product in the car assembly is the so called "time expanding effect". This effect is related to volatile workload and inefficiency. The traditional strategies to address the time expanding effect are all focused on process design. As an alternative, product design could be a good strategy to master the problem. The paper presents a method, which can assess the quality of the variant design concerning the time expanding effect. With an illustrative case is demonstrated how the method works and which results are possible. Finally further research work is addressed.