ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that production and market factors have a significant impact on the specific choice of assembly method. Assembly automation is considered quite important to the economic well-being of a manufacturing entity. This has prompted an increasing number of designers to adopt design for assembly (DFA) procedures. Based on the estimates of cycle times and fixed and variable costs, it was observed that the manual assembly of DFA products is more economical than their assembly using flexible automated methods. Several factors influence the cost of manual assembly and flexible automated assembly. They are as follows: performance time, production quantity, wage rate, interest rate, and reliability of robots. The chapter discusses the impact of production and market factors. In order to determine the impact of production volume on assembly costs, variations in the production volume of a DFA product were considered.
