Reducing investment costs in multi-variant mass production

Short product life cycles and a high variance within product generations continue to pose major challenges for manufacturing companies. Especially in highly automated mass production, one central question is how to deal with different specifications of product variants during the manufacturing process. Since a large product variety is usually associated with high investment costs, we present a methodical approach addressing the systematic reduction of machine investment in multi-variant production. The procedure is universally applicable to various industries and forms the basis for the development of an integrated construction kit for products and production processes.