Design-for-Takt and the Ideal Flow Assembly

Already in the introduction, in Sect. 1.4 , we showed that the greatest preventive effect for reducing manufacturing costs can be achieved in the product development process. A finding that can certainly be shared by all experienced managers and planners of an assembly. As model-mix assemblies of type 3 expand, the solution space of Mixed-Model Assembly Design (MMAD) for effective and efficient assemblies becomes smaller, and the entire boundary curve (Fig. 6.1) is shifted to the upper right. The task of Product Design for Mixed-Model Assembly (PD for MMA) is to increase the solution space again. In short: to shift the boundary curve to the lower left in Fig. 6.1. The well-known concepts of Design-for-Assembly (DFA) and Variant Management specifically aim at reducing manufacturing costs, mainly by reducing manufacturing and assembly efforts, quality costs, and variance. We describe these approaches only briefly in the following chapter because they are not the focus of our considerations. Our focus remains on mastering variance in assembly. For this purpose, Swist (2014) presents for the first time the concept of what we call Design-for-Takt, which we take up and extend with our own considerations, experiences, and analyses. The purpose of Design-for-Takt is the reduction of utilization losses (Sect. 2.8 ), for this reason, we extend the labeling of the Y-axis of Fig. 6.1 by this focus.