Indelning av bilar i monteringsvarianter och dess påverkan på material- och monteringsverksamheten i Volvo Uddevallafabriken

Report, 1989

Consumer report for the company in question (the Volvo Automobile Company) which is financed by the company and partly also by a research foundation. It is a matter of a work that in this particular case were carried out during nine years in a number of experimental workshops located outside the Chalmers University of Technology.

These workshops were financed by the Volvo Automobile and Truck companies. This achievement, as the final contribution to the Swedish automotive industry after having already treated this research field/problem area for more than two decades before this particular period if time (involving several junior and senior research competencies, as well as industrial and governmental foundings).

Specifically, this publication explains in one particular perspective how the authors dealt with the product architecture and product variation of the automotive products disassembled, which proved to necessary to be carried out in one of the experimental workshops (FOOTNOTE 1). Namely how the product variation and product variant were handled (FOOTNOTE 2). However, even if much of our work was introduced for full-scale production purposes was the product planning system practised in the Volvo Uddevalla plant never reformed (even if far-reaching efforts were considered before the closing down). The original planning system was one of the reasons for not being able to reap the potential of this assembly plant (i.e. the time-saving of some 2 – 4 hours in comparison to the Volvo Torslanda plant was not possible to accumulate due to the use of traditional codification of product variants suited for assembly line work) (see some of the other publications registered in Chalmers Public Library CPL).

FOOTNOTE 1: See a conference contribution from 1992 that also is registered and available as a PDF-document at Chalmers Public Library (CPL) (a self-developed method found out together with a junior research competency from the School of Architecture at Chalmers).

FOOTNOTE 2: See a conference contribution from 1990 denoted “Material Flow Analysis, Sociotechnology and Naturally Grouped…..” that also is registered and available as o PDF-document at Chalmers Public Library (CPL) (a self-developed method found out together with a junior research competency from the School of Architecture at Chalmers). This publication reports on an alternative system for planning of product variant long before the Volvo Uddevalla plant was closed down.