Understanding Changeability Enablers and Their Impact on Performance in Manufacturing Companies

Managing and capitalizing on product variety, customization, personalization, decreasing batch sizes, as well as rapid new product introductions are prevailing challenges facing today’s manufacturing companies. Changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing systems have been widely accepted as means to respond to these challenges, due to their ability to accommodate continuous and cost-efficient change in functionality and capacity. However, enablers of reconfigurability that should be selected during manufacturing system design are in current research rarely regarded in terms of their inherent relations and impact on manufacturing performance. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore implementation relations between physical enablers of reconfigurability on system and equipment level and their effect on manufacturing performance. For this purpose, a quantitative questionnaire-based survey has been conducted in various Danish manufacturing companies. The findings suggest that most reconfigurability enablers correlate strongly in their implementation and their extent of implementation generally correlates with critical performance aspects such as profitability, ramp-up time, and life-time of production systems.