Jason Matthews

Late customisation: issues of mass customisation in the food industry

The strategy of mass customisation is being increasingly adopted as companies seek to exploit market trends for greater product variety and individualisation. The implications of changing to mass customisation practice are considerable, where traditional contradictions of high volume and extensive product variety require being reconciled. The literature discusses the need for an integrated approach to mass customisation across all business functions if micro-segmentation of markets is to be profitably pursued, and the current paper investigates extending the paradigm of mass customisation into the, until now, poorly represented sector of food processing. Product design and manufacturing system design for mass customisation are reviewed and contrasted with good practice in more traditional mass customisation industries.

Constraint-based approach to investigate the process flexibility of food processing equipment

Over the last decade the UK food processing industry has become increasing competitive. This leads the sector to maintain high numbers of product variations. Although some of these products are stable over long periods, others are short lived or seasonal. The ability to handle both the complexity of process and large variations in product format creates extreme difficulties in ensuring that the existing manufacturing, handling and packaging equipment has the process flexibility to cope. This paper presents an approach for investigating the performance envelopes of machines utilizing a constraint modelling environment. The approach aims to provide the engineer with enhanced understanding of the range of functionality of a given machine and provides the possibility of redesign to process variant product.

Survey: A contemporary study into the application of neural network techniques employed to automate CAD/CAM integration for die manufacture

In recent years, collaborative research between academia and industry has intensified in finding a successful approach to take the information from a computer generated drawings of products such as casting dies, and produce optimal manufacturing process plans. Core to this process is feature recognition. Artificial neural networks have a proven track record in pattern recognition and there ability to learn seems to offer an approach to aid both feature recognition and process planning tasks. This paper presents an up-to-date critical study of the implementation of artificial neural networks (ANN) applied to feature recognition and computer aided process planning. In providing this comprehensive survey, the authors consider the factors which define the function of a neural network specifically: the net topology, the input node characteristic, the learning rules and the output node characteristics. In additions the authors have considered ANN hybrid approaches to computer aided process planning, where the specific capabilities of ANNs have been used to enhance the employed approaches.

The barriers to realising sustainable process improvement: A root cause analysis of paradigms for manufacturing systems improvement

To become world-class, manufacturing organisations employ an array of tools and methods to realise process improvement. However, many of these fail to meet expectations and/or bring about new less well understood problems. Hence, prior to developing further tools and methods it is first necessary to understand the reasons why such initiatives fail. This paper seeks to elicit the root causes of failed implementations and consider how these may be overcome. The paper begins by reviewing various paradigms for manufacturing systems improvement including design/redesign-, maintenance-, operator-, process-, product- and quality-led initiatives. In addition to examining the knowledge requirements of these approaches, the barriers to realising improvement are examined through consideration and review of literature from the fields of manufacturing, management and information systems. These fields are selected because of the considerable work that deals with process improvement, change management, information systems implementation and production systems. The review reveals the importance of fundamental understanding and highlights the lack of current methods for generating such understanding. To address this issue, the concept of machine-material interaction is introduced and a set of requirements for a supportive methodology to generate the fundamental understanding necessary to realise sustainable process improvement is developed.

Annotation of lightweight formats for long-term product representations

Companies operating in todays global economy are increasingly expected to manage the entire lifecycle of their products, and are finding advantage in a distributed, collaborative working style. However, existing three-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) systems are not well adapted to this way of working. This paper highlights some limitations in the current applications, and presents a framework for overcoming them based on three strands of current research: lightweight representations, the annotation of CAD models, and representation information as defined by the Open Archival Information System Reference Model (ISO 14721:2003). In the proposed framework, a ‘stand-off’ method is used to layer information, in the form of annotations, on top of both CAD models and lightweight representations alike. These annotations can be circulated independently of the geometry, facilitating more flexible information flow across the whole product lifecycle. The approach is demonstrated with an industrial case study.

An Information Support Approach for Machine Design & Building Companies:

The recording of information regarding machine function, performance, and failure, which is generated during the machine development, commissioning, and service is vital to an organization. Previous research has shown this information is often poorly recorded or even missed during these critical stages. The work presented in this article offers a solution based on the core product model, offering the potential to be revisit and retrieved the information throughout the product life cycle and into any next iteration of the design. An industrial case study presenting the operation of the approach is presented.

A constraint-net approach to the resolution of conflicts in a product with multi-technology requirements

While many procedures exist to support the systematic development of a product, it is often difficult to create an environment in which the early stages of the design are resolved. This can particularly happen when the product design is based upon a wide range of technologies and the expert members of the design team are drawn from many disciplines. The constraint resolution approach allows the requirements to be formed into rules and their combined truth established. Within such an environment an investigation has been undertaken to determine the possibility of establishing clusters of rules relating to individual technical aspects of the design requirements, which are then formed into networks that can be solved interactively within the constraint modelling environment. This paper draws upon the experience of designing a disposable cell counting device for medical applications and illustrates its adaptation to other applications through the use of the derived constraint-net.

The implementation of a direct search approach for the resolution of complex and changing rule-based problems

During the evolution of constraint modeling approaches, they have increased in their ability to resolve more and more complex problems. They all rely upon their ability to define the design problem by a set of constraint rules, which are true when the problem is solved, by the manipulation of selected free variables. However, as they have advanced differing techniques, they have been applied to address problems of increasing complexity. This study has been directed toward addressing those that are not only complex but also ill structured and evolving. In order to address such problems, an approach has been developed that employs sensitivity analysis and problem strategies to form an evolving direct search technique. While this is generic approach, which has been applied to a range of engineering problems, it is illustrated here through its use in a study into the posture modeling of humans. In this, it was recognized that such a new approach was required due to the complex description, limits, and postures possible in the human body.

Design for Changeover (DFC): enabling flexible and highly responsive manufacturing

A highly flexible manufacturing capability is central to the paradigm of mass customisation. In turn the role of rapid, high quality changeovers is crucial to this capability, whereby production can be switched with minimal penalty across a full (and expanding) range of product offerings. Many companies will seek better changeovers principally by refining the way that personnel complete assigned tasks. Further improvement opportunity can be sought by amending the design of process equipment. By means of focused design improvement an inherently more flexible manufacturing system can become available, on which simpler, more repeatable and faster changeovers can routinely take place.

Realizing sustainable process improvement through an understanding of machine–material interaction: part 1 – a methodology for audit, investigation, and improvement

In striving to become world class, manufacturing organizations employ an array of tools and methods to support improvement programmes to increase quality, efficiency, flexibility, and ultimately reduce unit cost and increase capability. However, many of these programmes are destined to fail at the outset, either in part or in full, due to a lack of holistic and fundamental understanding of the production system, its constituent processes, raw materials, and the product. In addition to this deficiency in understanding, there is further frustration caused by a lack of tools and methods that support the generation of such understanding. To address this critical gap, a methodology has been created to support the practitioner in investigating a processing system and what are referred to as machine–material interactions (MMIs). These interactions ultimately relate to the function of the processing system, and it is the complete and fundamental understanding of these interactions that is necessary to successfully apply improvement tools and approaches to deliver targeted and sustainable benefits. This article is the first of two parts which together present the development of the MMI methodology, its practical application to a complex industrial case, and its relationship to the range of manufacturing improvement tools and methods available, such as TQM, RCM, Lean, and Six Sigma. In this article, the development of the methodology is discussed in detail including the key stages of auditing, investigation and improvement. This article concludes with a discussion of the relationships between the knowledge generated by the methodology and the fundamental understanding required for process improvement.