Improving manufacturing process change by 3D visualization support: A pilot study on truck production

Journal article, 2016

In the global market, customer demands changes rapidly. Manufacturing companies need to meet the demands to keep competitive. Therefore, manufacturing processes constantly need to be changed. The process change is challenging because it involves different actors across the company, especially for international companies that have globally distributed operations. Manufacturing process change is carried out by production engineers and needs to consider the needs and requirement of all actors in the manufacturing system. To this end, guidelines for manufacturing system design and cross-functional team meetings for concept design assessment are utilized. While the meeting takes place, such meetings require resources to be available in parallel and advanced planning to come to fruition. Thus making the concept design iteration loop considerably longer if inputs are to be collected frequently. This paper presents an approach that utilizes a collaborative tool developed in Unity. It integrates 3D scanned factory data with proposed process changes to provide sufficient context to every stakeholders involved. Thus, to facilitate better understanding and communication of the ongoing changes. It will improve every process change on its design, implementation, and future maintenance. The challenges of implementation and evaluation of the collaborative tool are discussed.