It’s all in the mix: When standardized production processes meet modular components and agile manufacturing processes in mechanical engineering, the result is the greatest possible flexibility for the portfolio and customers. In practice, however, things look different. Many orders require individual adaptations to the customer’s specific requirements, which makes complex and lengthy production approaches such as Engineer To Order (ETO) necessary.
The major disadvantage of this is that the order-specific special designs require laborious manual work, documentation, cross-team agreements and masses of data for each modified component, from the smallest screw to the casing.
In view of the increasing technical and administrative complexity, many companies are quickly reaching their limits with “business as usual” – mechanical engineering must break new ground. In this blog, we take a look at how this can work.
Smart building blocks
Fortunately, the realization has been gaining ground for some years now that production that focuses on the manufacture and combination of individual modules offers much greater flexibility and reduces costs.
Whereas with monolithic constructions, every change entails a completely new design by the engineers and extensive conversions, individual, variable components can be combined with each other much more easily and cost-effectively. Different variants of the same product can be created from a certain number of modules without increasing the complexity immeasurably.
Modular building block systems also enable machine manufacturers to respond to the wishes and requirements of customers without great effort – a central component of most business models. This also opens up completely new possibilities in the area of self-service.
For example, customers can put together their preferred combinations themselves on the website and significantly reduce the time required for delivery. Finally, such an approach minimizes numerous upstream processes such as the description of the use case or the time to proposal. However, in order to implement truly efficient modularization in practice, the second pillar of innovative mechanical engineering is essential: the right software solutions.
Collaborative and transparent
The core attributes of modularization are efficiency, transparency and agility. In order for machine manufacturers to launch products and processes with these characteristics, the software solutions used must deliver exactly the same – and preferably centrally from a single source to minimize complexity.
However, everyday life in factories and offices is still dominated by knowledge silos and teams working in isolation. End-to-end digitalization is a prerequisite for bringing all participants, teams and departments together, efficiently storing large amounts of data and decisively driving collaboration.
mosaixx has set itself the task of developing a holistic cloud solution for precisely this missing piece of the puzzle and thus paving the way for the mechanical engineering of tomorrow.
When modular production approaches meet end-to-end digitalization, the result is huge potential that is barely tapped into today. Efficient processes, uncomplicated collaboration, centrally available data and the integration of industry-leading software raise productivity to a whole new level – while reducing complexity and costs.
