Flexible assembly layout : How a layout can be designed for low volume products under customer contracts in the electronics industry

Flexibility is a concept that is becoming more and more common in industries around the world. Customers demand products that is suitable for their specific needs. This requires that the production systems easily can be adapted to meet these needs. Together with a company in the electronics industry, this thesis studied flexible assembly layouts. The company today has three customer contracts where the products not continuously assembled. This leaves the production areas unused which creates low resource utilization. In order to address this issue the authors investigated how a more flexible assembly layout would meet the needs of a changing production. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how a flexible assembly layout could be designed, for low volume products under customer contract in the electronics industry. The goal was to find the most ideal layout design that would reduce the area which the assembly line occupies. This would make room for more customer contracts and still maintain the set requirements. To make it possible to evaluate the layout change, specific requirement for the assembly area was set. From there, the authors used three different concepts to create a flexible assembly area. Movable tool boards Small batch sizes U-line shaped assembly cells. Using these tools, three different layout designs were created and required different levels of investment. These layouts were compared to each other in order to identify differences. The result from this study shows a reduction of 24 -46 % in the assembly area if the proposed layouts designs were to be used. In conclusion, the authors propose to carry out a layout change but further studies need to be made on which potential customer contracts could benefit from this newly available area. From there, an appropriate degree of investment can be established. The layout designs consists of different concepts, as mentioned above, and they can be modulated to adapt to different needs. This makes the concepts generalizable and can be implemented in other assembly layouts with similar condition