ABSTRACT

With examples drawn from aerospace, electronics, household appliance, personal products, and automotive industries, Lean Assembly covers the engineering of assembly operations through:

  • Characterizing the demand in terms of volume by product and product family, component consumption, seasonal variability and life cycle.
  • Matching the physical structure of the shop floor to the demand with the goal of approaching takt-driven production as closely as possible.
  • Working out the details of assembly tasks station by station, including station sizing, tooling, fixturing, operator instructions, part presentation, conveyance between stations, and the geometry of assembly lines as a whole.
  • Incorporating mistake-proofing, successive inspection, and test operations for quality assurance.

    Lean Assembly differs from most other books on lean manufacturing in that it focuses on technical content as a driver for implementation methods. The emphasis is on exactly what should be done. This book should be the "dog-eared" and "penciled-in" resource on every assembly engineer's desk.

part A|56 pages

Analysis techniques

chapter Chapter 1|9 pages

Key issues of assembly operations

chapter Chapter 2|12 pages

Product quantity analysis

chapter Chapter 3|14 pages

Trend and seasonality analysis

chapter Chapter 4|18 pages

Takt time and capacity

part B|66 pages

Assembly concepts

chapter Chapter 5|23 pages

Visualizing the assembly process

chapter Chapter 6|17 pages

The concept of the assembly line

chapter Chapter 7|10 pages

Collecting assembly time data

chapter Chapter 8|12 pages

Line balancing

part C|96 pages

Detailed design

chapter Chapter 9|16 pages

Assembly station sizing

chapter Chapter 10|28 pages

Detailed design of assembly stations

chapter Chapter 11|21 pages

Part presentation

chapter Chapter 12|8 pages

Conveyance between stations

chapter Chapter 13|10 pages

Assembly cells

chapter Chapter 14|10 pages

Overall shape of assembly lines

part D|41 pages

Assembly quality

chapter Chapter 15|20 pages

Preventing picking errors

chapter Chapter 16|19 pages

Inspection, test, and rework operations