Developing High-Variant Products and Production Systems in Line with Value Stream Requirements Through Simulation

Markets are increasingly demanding greater product variety and, at the same time, ever shorter delivery times. In the case of new product development, it is often no longer possible for production to ensure a sufficiently high delivery capability with the help of lean methods and value stream methods. Especially if acceptable inventories and costs are assumed. During product development, products and product systems have not yet been sufficiently coordinated with each other from a value stream perspective and designed in a targeted manner. For this reason, it is crucial to align the product and its future production system with the goal of a functioning value stream as early as the concept phase of product development. Up to now, the value stream methodology has been used to analyze and optimize real production processes that are already running. In the future, the delivery times and delivery reliability of new products are to be secured by simulating the value stream based on the value stream methodology. In the context of Advanced Systems Engineering (ASE), the value stream resulting from the product is already created in an early phase of product development in order to be able to check the functionality of the production system and the deliverability of the product. Value stream simulation makes a significant contribution to improving cooperation between product development, production and logistics, as we can vividly present in this article using the ASE demonstration product. The value stream simulation revealed that the demonstration product had design weaknesses in terms of the required delivery capability. Assuming that no changes to the pro-duction system are possible, design changes were made to the product. The housing, which runs through a bottleneck line with over 100 variants, was standardized and the number of variants reduced to two. This led to later variant creation in the value stream. The variants now only appear in assembly, which can cope with many variants due to its high variant flexibility. The simulation of the revised product and the new value stream resulted in a significant improvement in delivery capability and the required short delivery times to the customer can be met.