With examples drawn from aerospace, electronics, household appliance, personal products, and automotive industries, Lean Assembly covers the engineering of assembly operations through:

• Characterizing the demand in terms of volume by product and product family, component consumption, seasonal variability and life cycle.
• Matching the physical structure of the shop floor to the demand with the goal of approaching takt-driven production as closely as possible.
• Working out the details of assembly tasks station by station, including station sizing, tooling, fixturing, operator instructions, part presentation, conveyance between stations, and the geometry of assembly lines as a whole.
• Incorporating mistake-proofing, successive inspection, and test operations for quality assurance.

  Lean Assembly differs from most other books on lean manufacturing in that it focuses on technical content as a driver for implementation methods. The emphasis is on exactly what should be done. This book should be the "dog-eared" and "penciled-in" resource on every assembly engineer's desk.

Michel Baudin (MMTI, Palo Alto, California, USA) (Author)

PART A: Analysis Techniques Chapter 1: Key issues of assembly operations Chapter 2: Product quantity analysis
Chapter 3: Trend and seasonality analysis Chapter 4: Takt time and capacity PART B: Assembly Concepts Chapter 5: Visualizing the assembly process Chapter 6: The concept of the assembly line Chapter 7: Collecting assembly time data Chapter 8: Line balancing PART C: Detailed Design Chapter 9: Assembly station sizing Chapter 10: Detailed design of assembly stations Chapter 11: Part presentation Chapter 12: Conveyance between stations Chapter 13: Assembly cells Chapter 14: Overall shape of assembly lines PART D: Assembly Quality Chapter 15: Preventing picking errors Chapter 16: Inspection, test, and rework operations