Four reasons why I believe modular production has the potential to re-shape the entire logic of today’s production lines
More than a century after the conveyor belt revolutionized manufacturing by ushering in mass production, it remains the dominant feature on most shop floors, especially in the automotive industry. Yet much has changed since Henry Ford famously declared about the Model T that “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”
Challenges with existing line production systems:
- Product mixes get more and more complex, individualized and diverse
- Innovation cycles become faster — manufacturers need to rapidly introduce new product models faster into existing plants & production lines
- Demand prediction becomes more challenging for production planning since trends such as e-mobility and autonomous driving disrupt entire industries
- Currently up to 70% of production floor space is reserved for internal logistics, which account for 15–30% of costs (handling and space needed can be reduced to almost zero with a modular approach)
In addition, COVID-19 is shaking up global supply chains as well as production systems requiring manufacturers to adapt faster then ever to rapid changes and deal with increased volatility under the “new normal”.
Conclusion: Although almost every company that sells a product has a production line, making manufacturing the biggest cost-driven industry globally with a volume of $8.3 trillion, the status quo of line production does not serve most of today’s requirements anymore. COVID-19 is only accelerating the need for change to offer more diverse and customized products with ever faster innovation cycles.
Modular production as a solution:
Munich-based arculus (https://www.arculus.de/) disrupts the traditional assembly line model of manufacturing with a modular production system approach, thereby enabling a higher product mix, making the production system more scalable and flexible in real-time. The team combines a proprietary real-time controlled software platform with autonomous mobile robots to offer the first full-stack turnkey modular production system:
- Stations are independent modules that can go on- and offline whenever needed without affecting others
- Every product creates its own variable process sequence making a new decision of where to go next after every station
- Modularity allows flexibility to adapt capacity in real time to demands
- System can be easily modified without stopping work flow
Compared to a line production, arculus increases productivity of production and logistics processes by more than 30%. The system can be applied to almost any manufacturing companies switching from a line production to a modular production logic.
Since the crisis poses an existential threat to many businesses, the key focus of SMEs has been on fast defense to stabilise their business, sustain jobs, maintain supply chains and manage liquidity. While this has without a doubt been the right and necessary initial step this “new normal” will require us to play both offence and defence. In the age of disruption the crisis poses a significant opportunity to double down on long-needed technology efforts to get ahead of the wave for the best possible ramp-up and productivity increases post-crisis.
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