Ilities for Responsive Manufacturing: A Case from Offshore Wind Turbine Manufacturing

We present here a discussion of responsiveness and related ilities in an Offshore Wind Manufacturer. This is stated first by the understanding that these terms may be vague and hard to define. To tackle this issue, a prescriptive semantic is used, which gives us a qualitative and quantitative starting point to define responsiveness in terms of reactivity an agility time. This is followed by a sports analogy, which gives insight for more ilities. A framework for categorization of these extra ilities is presented, based on detection, interpretation, computation, enforcement and adaptation time. A real case study in manufacturing from a production task (joint bolting) is used. Here, we discuss the initial problem, the solution, the consequences of the solution, with pros (e.g. visibility) and cons (e.g. wrong traceability). A discussion on an improved solution using digital tools is commented, as well as a list of improved ilities compared to the initial case. We finish the paper with a call for peers for more work in ilities using real and concrete examples from the industry.