Production of customized commercial vehicles in assembly line based on modified-to-order demands: A novel method and study case

The modernization of production and the consumer market’s demand for customized products in the commercial vehicle segment require new approaches and methodologies for development and manufacturing at competitive prices. Thus, to meet such needs, combined with the fact that companies are only interested in such demand with adequate financial results, it is necessary to adapt the customization process to the existing structure. The main objective of this research is to develop a structured method for designing and manufacturing customized commercial vehicles using serial production lines already installed and available in the automotive industries, mainly in environments where Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies are available. To this end, the proposed method is divided into three phases (Scoping phase, Design & Documentation, and Custom Production) in such a way as first to understand the customer’s needs, passing through the execution of the project in an optimized way based on standard products from the company’s portfolio to the manufacture of technically and financially possible modifications in Assembly Line (AL), through the application of Lean tools and I4.0 Technologies. The method is validated with a case study in a large company in the commercial vehicle market installed in Brazil, where the results obtained showed that it is possible to develop customized products with reduced time from existing products and among the modifications that can be manufactured in AL the results show an average reduction of over 80% in production times compared to manufacturing time in dedicated customization workshops, allowing the company to increase its annual production of customized vehicles in $\approx 35\text{\%}$ without any additional investment.