Quantifying the degree of assembly-readiness of high-variant low-volume products during the new product development process

An ever increasing amount of variants combined with decreasing product lifecycles forces manufacturing companies to start series production of newly developed products as early as possible. Especially when producing highly-variant products at low volumes, experience from industrial case studies shows that waiting until all variants are 100% ready to be assembled within a series production process is not an option. This raises the question when and at what risk series production can be launched successfully. To answer this question, we review commonly used maturity models and present an extension to allow a quantitative assessment of the degree of assembly-readiness. Our approach is based on a reference model of the process of attaining assembly-readiness, which has been elaborated through literature review and validated by expert interviews at a commercial vehicle manufacturer. Using a case study based on artificial data of a product undergoing the new product development (NPD) process, potentials and limitations of our approach are discussed and areas for future research are derived. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.