Chapter List

Overview

Many tools are available to visualize the assembly process for the purpose of analyzing it or of communicating design or improvement ideas. In most plants, engineers are pressured to work hastily within the space marked as available on a facilities blueprint. This results in line designs with convoluted webs of material flows, excess WIP and transportation steps, imbalanced operator jobs, and the waste of floor space.

Assembly line designs should instead be driven by material flows and operator movements. For sequences of assembly operations, the starting point is an "assembly master table" in spreadsheet format, containing assembly times, picking times, component and fastener lists, tool and fixture requirements, and comments for each operation. Flow diagrams then become useful to represent merging subassemblies and diverging flows.

While technically useful, formal flow diagramming tools are not as popular as one might expect, possibly because they are uncomfortably abstract for shop floor people, who respond better to layout diagrams marked up with material flows and operator movements. Three-dimensional drawings or cartoons are more effective informal communication tools, but are more difficult to generate and are not the best way to communicate dimension tolerances.

Digital photographs work well to document current states and can be doctored into previews of future states. Shop floor photographs should be taken from elevated positions, with camera location and orientation recorded to...