Identification of Residual Development Efforts in Agile Ramp-Up Production

Agile product development is increasingly finding its way into the development of physical products. The subsequent transfer of a planned and still unstable manufacturing process into stable series production after the design freeze is the goal of ramp-up production, but confronts manufacturing companies with different challenges. A currently high level of changes to the product geometry and the planned manufacturing sequence due to not achieved requirements in late phases of the ramp-up production (Residual Development Efforts-RDE) results in time-consuming and cost-intensive changes to the product and manufacturing sequence, which leads to failure to achieve ramp-up targets. The goal of current research is therefore to increase the agility of ramp-ups and to integrate the ramp-up production into the phase of agile product development. This offers the potential to use the increased dynamics of the product development process and the knowledge already generated for the validation and stabilization of the manufacturing process. However, due to the integration of ramp-up production into product development, there are additional far-reaching effects of product and technology uncertainties prevalent in agile product development on the design of agile ramp-up production. Additional uncertainties regarding the product geometry due to non-finalized designs and the resulting uncertainties regarding the probability of use and achievement of the requirements of the manufacturing technologies initially result in additional residual development efforts. Furthermore, the interactions between the manufacturing technologies in the manufacturing sequence are thus subject to additional uncertainties, which also leads to increased RDEs. To meet this challenge, it is necessary to analyze prevailing uncertainties and predict their impact on potential changes in agile ramp-up production. Therefore, a methodology is presented, which enables the analysis of product and technology uncertainties and thus the identification of product and process-related changes (RDE) in agile ramp-up production.