Innovative design on the shop floor of the Saint-Nazaire Airbus factory

Abstract

In this study, we examine innovative design practices on the Saint-Nazaire Airbus factory shop floor. The engineering and manufacturing engineering departments are in charge of the design of products and their industrialization, even though the factory is usually seen as a place for manufacturing, rather than design. However, there is also design activity in a factory that is devoted to the optimization of manufacturing processes. In this study, we highlight an alternative form of design that relies on a collective exploratory approach. A total of 30 projects from the Saint-Nazaire Airbus factory were selected and analyzed. Of these, two were selected as case studies to illustrate the factory's different design methods. Subsequently, quantitative analysis provided evidence of the existence of two design regimes: closed prescription and expandable prescription. The resulting solutions were examined, and it was found that designs under the expandable prescription regime provided more robust long-term solutions. This study offers new perspectives for reexamining innovation in manufacturing and exploring design activity on factory shop floors.

Industry 4.0 Management: Preliminary Design Implications

“…This is absolutely relevant in Industry 4.0 contexts, since: (i) creativity is required to go beyond known solutions for known problems; (ii) feasibility is essential to reduce uncertainty of technological adoption; (iii) robustness is needed to certify the effectiveness of the revolution. Concerning methodologies to apply C-K tool in Industry 4.0 factories, the proposed framework follows the methodologies introduced by some of the articles identified through the literature review, describing the application of design theory in industrial contexts (Cabanes et al;Harlé et al, 2022). In particular, the suggested methodology is a multiple case-study analysis comparing different firms' types, depending on firms' size and industries.…”

“…C-K = creation and sharing of new knowledge, by evaluating the relevance of new concepts and identifying absent or non-actionable knowledge in-house. Moreover, to ensure the widest variety of perspectives and knowledge on the phenomenon under analysis, Harlé et al (2022) suggest that each team is composed by managers and employees from different business functions and from different hierarchical levels. It is possible to summarize the proposed framework for future research and industrial applications of Industry 4.0, as follows.…”

“…From these articles, 4 articles are eliminated because not strictly related to the specific topic of the research. At this stage, the list is composed by the following articles: Rauch, Dallasega, and Matt, (2018); Sanderson, Chaplin and Ratchev, (2019); Hwang et al, (2021); Pessoa and MVP, (2020); Plehn, Stein, and Reinhart, (2015); Harlé et al, (2022); Bi et al, (2021);Egger, et al, (2017).…”

The Aircraft and Its Manufacturing System: From Early Requirements to Global Design

“…An assembly line is a sequence of workstations that corresponds to all the assembly stages of a product. In the aeronautics industry, assembly lines can be found at both Boeing [18] and Airbus [16,25].…”

“…Many works exist in the aeronautical industry which aims at improving the manufacturing system performance. For example, at Airbus, [16] focuses on improving the existing production line relying on a collective exploratory approach. Another example at Boeing focuses on optimizing the production flow and processes, relying on modeling and simulation analysis [18].…”