Assessment of Assembly Process Complexity and Modularity in Mass Customized Manufacturing

Consumers’ market is made up of huge number of products as a direct response to the ever increasing demands of customers. This situation is closely related to constantly evolving technical and technological industries. The rapidly increasing demand on products and variety of functional properties enabled a series of fast-growing and emerging processes and operations all over the industry. Unfortunately for companies, such variety results with a complexity of both, products and related processes. This paper deals with the external-product and internal-process complexity in the view of its usability within a mass customized manufacturing. A novel method to identify and measure product and process complexity of an assembly station is proposed on the basis of the number of product and process variants. Subsequently, the aggregated complexity ratios can provide a complexity map of an entire production line. The novel complexity assessment method is applied and verified on the case automotive manufacturing plant. As a result of this application, the newly-proposed complexity assessment methodology is highly useful especially in customized automotive production as an effective tool for assessing the level of complexity of a selected department, or when introducing a new installation. The newly-proposed methodology can be also adopted by a company to decide on what part or sub-module can be produced by external supplied—transfer of complexity—in order to decrease own process complexity and to keep the extent of variety offered to customers. Finally, based on the case application and verifications, the complexity assessment methodology proposed in this paper is highly applicable in the mass customized manufacturing.