Successful appliance manufacturing is increasingly dependent on flexibility and agility

With the pace of change accelerating and new market challenges and demands emerging, the ability to handle quickly changing conditions that drive shorter and multiple product mixes is a major challenge for many appliance manufacturers. Product lifetime is becoming shorter and shorter and complexity in production is increasing while market conditions are changing faster and faster.

It is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to in advance, with any level of certainty, understand what to produce that will meet future customer demands and what investments that will last over time. Should production capacities be reduced or increased within a 12-to-18-month window when accurate market predictions are increasingly difficult to make?

Flexibility, the ability to quickly adapt, is a key challenge but also an opportunity if harnessed in an appliance manufacturing world where the linear forecast exists no more.

Changing product variants create the need for more flexible and adaptable production lines that fully utilize operational data from multiple systems. This can be achieved by implementing a fully integrated technology ecosystem based on industry standard protocols and data analysis solutions that offer easily comprehendible insights that bring potential issues to early attention.

An end-to-end, fully integrated, manufacturing and assembly line on a factory level scale enables that production lines proactively, in real-time, can be rebalanced and adapted to product mix changes. Flexibility advantages that are further enhanced if manufacturing processes are automated. This positive interaction between flexibility and automation is what lies behind the growing use of the term “flexible automation” in manufacturing processes.