Abstract:

An informed analysis of any industry still driven by the third industrial revolution (e.g. computer-aided automation of flexible manufacturing systems) shows in many cases that product design plays a very important role in production processes. The strategies applied in the 1980s by industrial enterprises, whose prime objective was to eliminate any kind of waste in production processes (in line with the Lean^[1] method), brought many production systems to a point where each subsequent investment to improve efficiency and productivity yielded an increasingly smaller effect. Therefore, engineers were compelled to look for solutions which, embedded in the final product, would make the processes of production, quality, logistics and logistic chain more effective and efficient. This is all the more important because at a time marked by ongoing challenges associated with the implementation of Industry 4.0. the role of the product in and of itself appears to be of key importance.