Big size highly customised product manufacturing systems: a literature review and future research agenda

Abstract

The paper presents a systematic literature review on big size product manufacturing systems in MTO and ETO environments. In particular, the analysis is focused on highly customised, big and heavy products, calling for highly engineering solutions. This kind of products are characterised by low-volume demand, complex material bills, need of more than one worker in the same workstation (caused by the component dimensions and complexity), multi-skilled human resources and large floor space requirements. The analysis involved 587 research articles published from 1981 to 2017 from 118 international journals in the area of production research and operation management. Finally, 160 papers have been individuated and clustered in three main research topic area: specification processes and product design, production planning and control, project portfolio management. Results indicate that research focused on optimising and managing a large-size product manufacturing system is gaining growing attention in the last ten years. However, product/process design, production planning and control and project management techniques still lack innovations and ad hoc methods, capable to take into consideration both in-house part feeding problems, both ergonomics issues present in this kind of manufacturing environments.