Management of newness in an assembly system

The need for new products to suit differentiated customer needs and shorter product life-cycles, forces manufacturers to change or modify products and production systems at more frequent intervals. The objective of this paper is to discuss management of newness within assembly system design in the vehicle industry. Based on a case study covering four assembly development projects, a model using the quality concept of 7M is presented to evaluate the level of newness. The results show that the model provides a promising platform for evaluation of newness.