Exploring Manufacturing System Development and the Use of Platforms to Reduce Time-to-Market

In the development and launch of new products to the market, manufacturing companies are continuously pressured to reduce time and cost to sustain competitiveness. In this regard, the effective and efficient development and ramp-up of manufacturing systems is a critical factor. However, while agile methods for increasing the speed of product design and development have received wide attention in both research and practice, manufacturing system development has in contrary been less explored and generally regarded as a less systematic or as an ad-hoc task. Therefore, this paper presents a multiple case-study from a large Danish manufacturing company with the aim of exploring challenges in three different manufacturing system development projects. The within-case and cross-case findings indicate that manufacturing system development indeed is a critical task, where many challenges regarding product to manufacturing system interface and internal interfaces in the manufacturing system architecture exists. Furthermore, findings indicate that lack of interface management leads to the redesign of new manufacturing systems, rather than reuse and reconfiguration. Thus, the case findings suggest a potential in increasing the use and reuse of existing manufacturing systems and explicitly designing platforms for reducing development cost and time.