De laatste decennia is tijd een strategische concurrentiefactor geworden in de maakindustrie (Demeter, 2013; Godinho Filho et al., 2017a; Gromova, 2020). Naast tijdige levering verwacht de klant ook keuze, maatwerk, hoge kwaliteit en een lage prijs (Siong et al., 2018; Suri, 2020). Om de door de klant gewenste korte doorlooptijd te kunnen realiseren en daarbij ook te voldoen aan zijn andere eisen, zijn flexibiliteit en aanpassingsvermogen essentieel geworden (Godinho Filho et al., 2017b; Siong et al., 2018). Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) heeft als doel de doorlooptijd te verkorten in productieomgevingen die gekenmerkt worden door een hoge variëteit in producten en maatwerk (Suri, 2020; Siong et al., 2018). QRM kent zijn oorsprong begin jaren negentig van de vorige eeuw (Suri, 2020) en vertoont sterke gelijkenis met lean manufacturing. Het verschil met lean manufacturing is echter dat QRM zich richt op bedrijven in een omgeving met veel productvariatie. Daarnaast heeft QRM nieuwe elementen toegevoegd, zoals Paired-cell Overlapping Loops of Cards with Authorization (POLCA) en Manufacturing Critical Path Time’ (MCT)’ (Godinho Filho et al., 2017b).
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The aim of this research is to explore the potential of Mixed Reality (MR) technologies for Operator Support in order to progress towards Industry 4.0 (I4.0) particularly for SMEs. Through a series of interventions and interviews conducted with local SMEs, potential use cases and their drawbacks have been identified. From this, insights were derived that serve as a starting point for conducting further experiments with MR technology in the smart manufacturing laboratory at the THUAS in Delft. The intervention consisted of a free form workshop in which the participants get ‘tinkering’ time to explore MR in their own work environment. The various levels of awareness were assessed in three stages: during an introductory interview, and after an instruction meeting and some ‘tinkering’. The study took place in the period from January 2022 to July 2022 with 10 local SMEs in the Netherlands. The results show that for all SMEs the awareness and understanding increased. The use cases identified by operators themselves concerned Quality Control, Diagnostics, Instruction, Specification and Improvement of Operations. Drawbacks foreseen related to Ergonomic Concerns, Resistance from operators, Technical considerations, Unavailability of MR device and an insufficient digital infrastructure to support MR in full extent. The use case most promising to the participants was further developed into a physical prototype for an ‘assisted assembly cell’ by which the aspects of ergonomics and the mentioned technical considerations could be analysed.
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