Enabling manufacturing flexibility issue resolution in advanced vehicle development

Manufacturing Flexibility is a broad term used to describe a metric that can be measured in many different ways. Current industry experts agree that Flexibility is one of the key measures that will help the automotive industry reduce current overcapacity and remain competitive. In addition to flexibility, General Motors is also focusing on fewer, interbuildable product architectures.To maintain and implement flexible manufacturing systems, General Motors has developed a list of Flexibility Enablers. These enablers identify critical product characteristics which affect the interbuildability of the product and the flexibility and of the subsequent manufacturing process.Market forces drive product requirements, and lead to designs that potentially violate the Flexibility Enablers. This thesis will look at GM's internal structure and how it has developed to support design decisions and issue resolution. It will then study cases in which the design requirements led to design, manufacturing and cost tradeoffs in an attempt to understand and document the different unwritten resolution processes in disparate groups.Keywords: Manufacturing Flexibility, Product Development, Flexibility Enabler, Interbuildability.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Tomlin, Grace C. (Grace Catherine)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Warren Seering and Eric Rebentisch.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Mechanical Engineering.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44306

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/44306