The individual manufacture is that production method, with which usually only one unit of a product is at the same time manufactured. No product resembles completely or approximately the other one. One differentiates during the individual manufacture:

• unique individual manufacture: With this production method each product is designed and manufactured as Unikat, like for example golden the gate Bridge.
• repeated individual manufacture: A product is recurring manufactured, however the interruption between the production times is so large that the necessary manufacturing equipment is kept not ready for use but diminished in this time, like for example with shipbuilding.

Characteristics

• Individual manufacture is order completion. That is, it is manufactured not for an anonymous market with different potential customers, but for a concretely available order by a customer. The individual manufacture depends therefore on the capacity as well as on the technical possibilities of the operational funds. There is no firm production programme.
• Enterprises with individual manufacture need universally applicable manufacturing plants, as well as large machinery, so that they can react to the different customer's requests. Further the production plants must have fast to be reequipped.
• Enterprises with individual manufacture need a well trained and qualified personnel that is flexibly applicable.
• The production organization of enterprises with individual manufacture is usually a workshop production, which is coined/shaped by spatial concentration.
• The classical process types for individual manufacture systems are: "make tons of order" and "assemble tons of order".

Advantages

• The fulfilment more individually and customer's requests also failed is possible
• Enterprises can adapt changed market situations faster
• Increase of the satisfaction and motivation of the personnel due to the diversity of the products, which are manufactured

Disadvantages

• From individual manufacture high unit cost prices result
• The customer must accept long delivery times, if individual parts for the unit of a product are not immediately available
• Small foreseeableness of the orders of the customers

Examples

Individual manufacture steps on in the building of large machines, e.g. Shipbuilding, frequently in the machine tool manufacture, in the equipment construction, in the building industry (housebuilding, bridge construction) in addition, within the range relating to crafts, clothes and shoes e.g. measure-manufactured. In cases of complete reconstructions, with which only few to existing designs, parts lists and schedules can be fallen back, one speaks it also of Sondereinzelfertigung.Auch with the production of artificial dentures concerns one-off productions of a dentist or a Dentallabors.

Further manufacturing types are the quantity production, the sort manufacturing and the mass production.

Literature recommendation

• Christoph snow white: Introduction to the production economy, Berlin et al. 2002, ISBN 3540431926

Articles in category "Individual manufacture"

We found here 7 articles.