An assembly line is a manufacturing process in which parts are added as the semi-finished assembly moves from workstation to workstation where the parts are added in sequence until the final assembly is produced. By mechanically moving the parts to the assembly work and moving the semi-finished assembly from work station to work station, a finished product can be assembled faster and with less labor than by having workers carry parts to a stationary piece for assembly.
Mass production, also known as flow production or continuous production, is the production of substantial amounts of standardized products in a constant flow, including and especially on assembly lines. Together with job production and batch production, it is one of the three main production methods.
Material requirements planning (MRP) is a production planning, scheduling, and inventory control system used to manage manufacturing processes. Most MRP systems are software-based, but it is possible to conduct MRP by hand as well.
An engineering drawing is a type of technical drawing that is used to convey information about an object. A common use is to specify the geometry necessary for the construction of a component and is called a detail drawing. Usually, a number of drawings are necessary to completely specify even a simple component. The drawings are linked together by a master drawing or assembly drawing which gives the drawing numbers of the subsequent detailed components, quantities required, construction materials and possibly 3D images that can be used to locate individual items. Although mostly consisting of pictographic representations, abbreviations and symbols are used for brevity and additional textual explanations may also be provided to convey the necessary information.
In marketing, a product is an object or system made available for consumer use; it is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy the desire or need of a customer. In retailing, products are often referred to as merchandise, and in manufacturing, products are bought as raw materials and then sold as finished goods. A service is also regarded to as a type of product.
Automotive engineering, along with aerospace engineering and naval architecture, is a branch of vehicle engineering, incorporating elements of mechanical, electrical, electronic, software, and safety engineering as applied to the design, manufacture and operation of motorcycles, automobiles, and trucks and their respective engineering subsystems. It also includes modification of vehicles. Manufacturing domain deals with the creation and assembling the whole parts of automobiles is also included in it. The automotive engineering field is research -intensive and involves direct application of mathematical models and formulas. The study of automotive engineering is to design, develop, fabricate, and test vehicles or vehicle components from the concept stage to production stage. Production, development, and manufacturing are the three major functions in this field.
A product's service life is its period of use in service. It is mostly used in a non-technical context and has no scientific support or meaning. Several other terms more accurately describe a product's life, from the point of manufacture, storage, and distribution, and eventual use.
In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design, and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products. PLM integrates people, data, processes and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprise.
Product data management (PDM) or product information management (PIM) is the business function often within product lifecycle management (PLM) that is responsible for the management and publication of product data. In software engineering, this is known as version control. The goals of product data management include ensuring all stakeholders share a common understanding, that confusion during the execution of the processes is minimized, and that the highest standards of quality controls are maintained.
A car platform is a shared set of common design, engineering, and production efforts, as well as major components over a number of outwardly distinct models and even types of cars, often from different, but somewhat related marques. It is practiced in the automotive industry to reduce the costs associated with the development of products by basing those products on a smaller number of platforms. This further allows companies to create distinct models from a design perspective on similar underpinnings.
A bill of materials or product structure is a list of the raw materials, sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, sub-components, parts, and the quantities of each needed to manufacture an end product. A BOM may be used for communication between manufacturing partners or confined to a single manufacturing plant. A bill of materials is often tied to a production order whose issuance may generate reservations for components in the bill of materials that are in stock and requisitions for components that are not in stock. There are two types of bill materials.
A part number is an identifier of a particular part design or material used in a particular industry. Its purpose is to simplify reference to that item. A part number unambiguously identifies a part design within a single corporation, and sometimes across several corporations. For example, when specifying a screw, it is easier to refer to "HSC0424PP" than saying "Hardware, screw, machine, 4-40, 3/4" long, pan head, Phillips". In this example, "HSC0424PP" is the part number, and it may be prefixed in database fields as "PN HSC0424PP" or "P/N HSC0424PP".
Operations management is an area of management concerned with designing and controlling the process of production and redesigning business operations in the production of goods or services. It involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as few resources as needed and effective in meeting customer requirements.
Design for Excellence or Design For Excellence, are terms and expansions used interchangeably in the existing literature, where the X in design for X is a variable which can have one of many possible values. In many fields X may represent several traits or features including: manufacturability, power, variability, cost, yield, or reliability. This gives rise to the terms design for manufacturability, design for inspection (DFI), design for variability (DfV), design for cost (DfC). Similarly, other disciplines may associate other traits, attributes, or objectives for X.
Design for manufacturability is the general engineering practice of designing products in such a way that they are easy to manufacture. The concept exists in almost all engineering disciplines, but the implementation differs widely depending on the manufacturing technology. DFM describes the process of designing or engineering a product in order to facilitate the manufacturing process in order to reduce its manufacturing costs. DFM will allow potential problems to be fixed in the design phase which is the least expensive place to address them. Other factors may affect the manufacturability such as the type of raw material, the form of the raw material, dimensional tolerances, and secondary processing such as finishing.
Engineer to order is a production approach characterized by:
- Engineering activities need to be added to product lead time.
- Upon receipt of a customer order, the order engineering requirements and specifications are not known in detail. There is a substantial amount of design and engineering analysis required.
Process manufacturing is a branch of manufacturing that is associated with formulas and manufacturing recipes, and can be contrasted with discrete manufacturing, which is concerned with discrete units, bills of materials and the assembly of components. Process manufacturing is also referred to as a 'process industry' which is defined as an industry, such as the chemical or petrochemical industry, that is concerned with the processing of bulk resources into other products.
Frame technology (FT) is a language-neutral system that manufactures custom software from reusable, machine-adaptable building blocks, called frames. FT is used to reduce the time, effort, and errors involved in the design, construction, and evolution of large, complex software systems. Fundamental to FT is its ability to stop the proliferation of similar but subtly different components, an issue plaguing software engineering, for which programming language constructs or add-in techniques such as macros and generators failed to provide a practical, scalable solution.
Pay on production (PoP) is a special build-operate-transfer (BOT) model, where payment is made to a supplier by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) per piece produced on the supplier's own equipment by the OEM's employees.
Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the management of all product configuration definitions and configurations across all involved business processes applied throughout the lifecycle of a product.
