Assembly supply chain

RFID Integration Models for Digital Pharmaceutical Manufacturing and Assembly Supply Chains... 

RFID SYSTEM INTEGRATION MODELS FOR DIGITAL PHARMACEUTICAL MANUFACTURING AND ASSEMBLY SUPPLY CHAINS... 

An assembly structure is one in which products from separate suppliers or plants are combined to form subassemblies, which in turn are combined to form the final assembly. Figure 2.1 shows a sample assembly supply chain. Automobile industry manufacturers, such as Toyota, Honda, and Ford, all use tiered purchasing arrangements, in which subassemblies from one set of suppliers are combined at the next level until the final car assembly, thus generating an assembly structure of suppliers. In such structures, the complete kit of parts from all suppliers is necessary to complete assembly. Thus, a key task for the operation of an assembly structure is coordinating the deliveries from all suppliers to produce a unit of a finished product. 

A Car Assembly Structure Figure 2.1 An assembly supply chain... 

The build-operate-transfer model is borrowed from the automotive industry, where parts suppliers install their plants as satellites on the premises of the final assembler of the car. The main advantages are a zero distance supply chain and shared infrastructure. 

Just-in-Time (JIT) Delivery Refers to a supply chain practice whereby manufacturers receive components on or just before the time that they are needed on the assembly line, rather than bearing the cost of maintaining several days or weeks supply in a warehouse. This adds greatly to the cost-effectiveness of a manufacturing plant and puts the burden of warehousing and timely delivery on the supplier of the components. 

Nature of the business in terms of customer orders This cheuacterization includes make-to-stock, make-to-order, assemble-to-order, and engineer-to-order. It has a great deal to do with what the detailed business operations ace and how operational and tactical planning is done. Qeariy this categorization has a tremendous influence on the ERP requirements emd on the behavior of the enterprise in its supply chain. More than any other, this characterization determines the nature of the delivery activities and the dependence on supplier relationships. 

Due to the complexity of environmental impacts, the Swedish Environmental Institute and Volvo recommend consideration of the following characteristics in their environmental priority strategies (EPS) system scope, extent of distribution, frequency and intensity, duration or permanence, significance of contribution, and remediabtiity (Horkeby 1997 Ryding et al. 1993). Another complexity to consider is the transfer of impacts along the supply chain because materials extraction, assembly, use, reuse, recycling, and disposal may occur in different locations around the world. 

Secondly, globalized production cannot work unless aU elements of the company s global operations fit together without error. Thus, new production systems based on pervasive computer-mediated design and manufacturing can assemble parts from up and down the supply chain without first-time errors of fit. Modern civil and military aircraft production give prime examples of this freedom from physical error. In a customer-oriented system, any over-cost or delayed delivery is an error with the same effects on company performance as a defective product. The implication for test and inspection is that we must be able to measure these customer needs and convert them into measurable precursors of error states. 

Assembly postponement refers to maintaining a product in a given state for as long as possible and customizing it after demand is realized. Thus, a set of products is replaced by a common platform product that is manufactured and customized only after demand is realized. Such an approach is also called design for logistics. This approach involves designing the product to reduce supply chain costs. 

There are many other examples of assembly postponement. The salad bar at a restaurant is a classic example of making the customer assemble their desired salad on demand. Hardware stores claim to carry over 30,000 colors of paint. But in most cases they carry only a small number of primary colors and additives and create the color on demand with the aid of software. Such assembly postponement permits lowering of supply chain costs while maintaining customer choice. 

Thus, an important question for an existing supply chain is Can assembly postponement, through product design changes, enable supply chain improvement ... 

Many supply chains have an assembly structure for product manufacturing followed by a distribution structure for product distribution. The assembly structures enable economies of scale in transportation and assembly, while the distribution structure enables efHdencies in matching finished goods inventories with product demand across retail locations. 

Decisions regarding capacity and flexibility of plants in an automobile supply chain have to anticipate parameters several years out into the future. This is true for large assembly plants that take several years to... 

Each of the three problem contexts described earlier has the following basic structure A set of sources of supply has to be linked by a supply system to a set of demand locations. Figure 2.3 shows the supply and demand nodes for Delco (three supply nodes and thirty demand nodes). Merloni had five supply nodes and seventeen demand nodes. Letin had five supply nodes and twenty-five demand nodes. Notice that in the Delco case, the flows from supply to demand nodes consist of components used to assemble cars. In the Merloni and Letin cases, the flows consist of finished goods from assembly plants to locations closer to customers. But the abstraction of these problems has the same structure. What are possible ways to create a supply chain from these supply locations to the demand locations ... 

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