Strategic Production Development

Description of the project

Although it has long been recognized that an efficient development of production system can facilitate both new product development and operational excellence, research into the process of developing production systems has received surprisingly little attention. There is a need to support manufacturing companies to not only become world-class in developing products but also to be innovative in the development of production systems. For Volvo CE innovative production development is an important enabler for future competitiveness. Manufacturing research at Volvo CE is developing support to create the best possible production system that easily can be ramped-up to full production volumes in order to gain competitive advantages. A balanced industrial/academic approach is very important in such a case.

The objective of this project is to identify and validate new and innovative processes and strategies for production system development facilitating manufacturing companies in their efforts of being fast and cost-effective when introducing new products to the market and change between different products in manufacturing.

The expected results for the project are 1) Identify and visualize future production system needs/solutions, 2) Identification of strategies and processes to be used for strategic production development, 3) Validation of the proposed development solutions in terms of a selected technology area, 4) Disseminate the results within Volvo CE, the manufacturing community and in academia