Looking for stuff, whether it be keys, wallet, phone, meeting notes, spices in a kitchen cabinet, or pencils in my woodworking shop, is the bane of my existence. Some days, I feel as if I spend more time looking for stuff than I do actually using the stuff I was looking for.
Optimizing flow and minimizing waste are two of the basic elements of lean manufacturing. Those concepts also play a critical role in laying out assembly lines.
Designing a medical device or consumer product can take a long time. Designing an automated assembly system for those products shouldn’t add any more. Starting with a standardized assembly platform can reduce engineering time and get the product to market faster.
Designing and building a multistation automated assembly system takes time. A simple project might take 12 to 14 weeks. A complex one could take three or four times that long.
There are two opposite ways to equip factories to respond quickly to downstream customer orders: One way is for sequential production, and the other is for concurrent production. Both draw heavily from best practices in lean manufacturing.