Applying mass customization to the production of industrial steam turbines

Abstract

An industrial steam turbine is typically an engineered-to-order product, so the principle and methods of mass customization are widely applied in its production. We can re-engineer the development design process of this product into two phases – innovative development process and agile design process – and perform product family-oriented modularized development. The product's master structure model is used for configuration design, and its part/component models are used for variant design. Together, the configuration design and variant design constitute rapid product design. Furthermore, through standardization, modularization, serialization, process reengineering, rapid design and automated manufacturing, the customer order decoupling point of product and its parts/components are postponed. In the production process, some effective measures should be taken such as orders-merging production, unified materials ordering and unified parts/components manufacturing, in order to enhance the batch profit. Adopting product family-oriented ABC analysis, the rough product structure can be built. Thus, product cost and lead-time are estimated on the basis of practical cases, and hence, the possible production plan can be worked out. The successful application of mass customization will effectively shorten lead-time and remarkably reduce production cost of the steam turbine.

Keywords:

• Mass customization
• Industrial steam turbine
• Lead-time
• Cost

Acknowledgements

This paper builds on research work financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation, China (No. 70271013, 60374057, 50575204) and the National High-Tech. R&D Program for CIMS, China (No. 2005AA411910).