Manufacturing system support for product redesign

A small company has approximately 10% of the market for its water filter product The product is assembled entirely annually, including labelling and packaging, from a set of sub-contracted manufactured parts, Initial investigations show the cost of producing and importing the product from abroad is 70% of the current cost of manufacture and assembly in the UK. The company aims to reduce its costs by establishing an in-house automated manufacturing and flexible assembly facility. This is to take advantage of the economics of scale in a fast growing market, to improve the product design for both manufacture and assembly, to improve its UK market share and to help find new markets in continental Europe. The paper addresses the problems of the product re-design for improved manufacture and assembly while establishing a new in-house manufacturing facility and a flexible automated assembly system for the product. In an attempt to achieve the required improvements in design, manufacture and assembly it is necessary to generate a manufacturing operations system model. The system model is then used to undertake a detailed study of the proposed system arrangement, to analysis the system performance for comparison with the present operation and to examine the expected change of infrastructure in the company. It is anticipated the company will undergo a change in technical expertise with the introduction or new technology for both the mechanical engineering design function and for the manufacturing and assembly functions.