Constraint-mapping based collaboration procedure for enhancing commonality of supplier manufacturing processes

Abstract

It is the most effective way of achieving the low cost without sacrificing quality to exploit the economy of scale of resources. This study suggests a collaborative product-process design procedure for an OEM, who designs a variety of components and outsources their production to a single supplier, and the supplier, who manufactures those components as designed. The supplier needs to maximize commonality of their manufacturing processes to produce them at a low cost, and then the OEM can buy them at a low price. This study defines rules to produce a variety of products with a common manufacturing resource as constraints and proposes an effective negotiation procedure to optimize the tradeoff between commonality and variety by mapping constraints to manufacturing resources and design parameters. It also developed a system to support the procedure by visualizing those constraining relationships. This system and the procedure are illustrated by a case of designing and manufacturing an automotive component. ICIC International ©2021