Product and production design - Rethinking views on flexibility

The recent years have shown that long global supply chains are vulnerable considering volatile markets. As a result, efforts to achieve supply chain resilience are increasing. Achieving resilience requires flexibility, incorporated in product development, which can be implemented by the production system. Flexibility also offers the advantage in the context of sustainability that production facilities remain in use longer than rigid production lines because they can be better retrofitted. Furthermore, volatile markets challenge companies with a higher frequency of changes of requirements and decreasing forecast quality. Accompanied by a decreasing time-to-market and higher complexity of products companies need to increase their overall flexibility. A particular challenge is that routing flexibility is not used in production, for example, because the control effort is too time-consuming and complex. The use of AI and cyber-physical systems provides support to manage the control effort and thus enable flexibility in production. This paper discusses the role of flexibility in product development and production planning. The characteristics of products and production systems are analysed to identify important design aspects for flexibility. Comparing different systems shows for instance that non-linear structures with flexible links offer strategic advantages.