Evaluation of Reconfigurability in Brownfield Manufacturing Development

Abstract

To enable manufacturing firms adapting their manufacturing capabilities to meet the market demands in a cost-efficient way the concept of reconfigurable manufacturing was initiated. A majority of the research within this field targeting production development has been focused on greenfield development methods, enabling the developers to ignore context and constraints that brownfield development methods cannot. The greenfield focus in reconfigurability research has resulted in how to find optimal solutions to reconfiguration problems. Taking a brownfield focus on reconfigurable manufacturing development would enable to move step-by-step towards a reconfigurable manufacturing strategy instead of the all-or-nothing approach of greenfield development methods. This study investigates through a literature review what assessment tools and methods that exists in literature, and classifies them into four categories, i.e. Configuration evaluation, Element of evaluation, Pre-design evaluation, and Potential evaluation. It is found that there only exist two assessment tools for potential evaluation. Through a multiple case study, the potential evaluation process is evaluated, and three gaps is identified, i.e. lack of connection to strategy, lack of predefined goals for reconfigurability, and the difficulty in interpreting the result of the analysis. These gaps are then address in a new conceptual assessment process for assessing the potential of reconfigurability. The conceptual assessment process links the six reconfigurability characteristics throughout the whole assessment process to link manufacturing strategy to the improvement suggestions.