Abstract
During the progress of changes in the surroundings of the automobile industry and a wide variety of consumer preferences, it is very difficult for us to estimate future consumption trends in production volume or specifications. To timely provide low-priced and high-quality competitive products even in these surroundings, we should create a production system that can promptly accommodates the changeable production volume or specifications while maintaining highly efficient conventional production. We found one potential solution to the issues surrounding the development of the independent production system capable of promptly responding, without losses, to line balancing of manual processes most susceptible to changes in yield cycle time caused by the changes in production volume or specifications or time differences in assembly between models on a mixed production line. This paper introduces one of applicable examples of the independent production system for a wide-variety/low-volume assembly line used for obsolete-model engines, which was adopted as the 1st step activity.
