Exploring the Potential of Technical Interoperability within Low Volume Manufacturing Design Integration – A Case Study

Reducing lead times and quickly introducing new products to the market is becoming increasingly more important for low-volume manufacturing. This has led to management principles such as design manufacturing integration to shorten the time to market of new products. This puts immense pressure on the new product development (NPD) process, since it is both time-intensive and a critical interface between manufacturing and design, requiring a significant amount of data to be transferred between these two functions and their systems. Successful integration between design and manufacturing requires a robust product data infrastructure, with high levels of technical interoperability to facilitate effective data flow between systems. However, research on the topic of technical interoperability and its impact on design manufacturing integration within NPD processes is limited. A longitudinal case study was conducted at a low-volume development site, wherein an NPD process, and its product data infrastructure were analysed from a technical interoperability perspective. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of technical interoperability for design manufacturing integration, by identifying bottlenecks within a NPD process. This case study identified two systems lacking technical interoperability: the product data management (PDM) system and the customer requirements database. This lack of technical interoperability caused negative impacts such as increased manual administrative load, late design revisions and extended lead times. From the discussion it can be derived that by increasing the technical interoperability of these systems, the aforementioned issues can be mitigated, enhancing the overall design manufacturing integration.