Lean manufacturing tool in engineer-to-order environment: Project cost deployment

The present paper proposes a modified version of the Manufacturing cost deployment (MCD) method to analyse engineer-to-order (ETO) production systems. The novel approach, named Project cost deployment (PCD), introduces two substantial and innovative modifications. To begin with, the concept of manual assembly macro-activity replaces the traditional concept of station. Then, a brand-new structure for classifying and analysing losses is introduced, that is specifically defined to deal with the inefficiencies of the manual assembly tasks. The validity of the approach is proved by a real-world industrial application. The obtained results demonstrate that the PCD method allows the analyst to identify the hidden losses and to quantify the wastes from an economical point of view. In addition, PCD permits to estimate the impacts of potential (lean) improvement activities and projects in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.