Process Platform and Production Configuration for Integrated Manufacturing and Service

In regard to global competition, integrated manufacturing and service systems has emerged as a new manufacturing paradigm to assist manufacturers in achieving faster design, manufacturing and delivery of customer-specified products at low costs. The linchpin of realizing an economy of scale in production in such systems lies in routings to be adopted to produce product variety. This paper thus proposes a concept of production configuration as a means for manufacturers to obtain the set of optimal and similar routings for families of customized products. In turn the economy of scale in production can be achieved through production activity repetition and manufacturing resources reuse. Production configuration has been applied to the high variety production of vibration motors in a local electronics company. The preliminary results show the potential of production configuration for the quick and low cost product fulfillment for integrated manufacturing and service.