Exploring shopfloor data collection challenges within ETO and its impact on Production Planning and Control : Master thesis

Sammanfattning: The increasing trends towards customization which has also been emphasized as a competitive advantage have resulted in engineering-to-order (ETO) companies having a leading role in many industries. However, in parallel with this digital information and technological advancement is rising, and companies are aiming to improve their processes to consequently reach greater success in their operations. Recent research has discussed Industry 4.0 and improved production planning methods in the manufacturing industry. Thus, manufacturing companies are striving to increase their efficiency levels and readily available data has been one of the most important and common denominators for this transformation, in fact, considered a necessity to survive in the current highly competitive market. Despite this, data collection which is a crucial part remains unexplored by academia and especially in ETO but also production planning methodologies as well as tool considering that they have a complex production process and relies heavily on manual labor from skilled operators.  Thus, this thesis sets out to investigate and explore shopfloor data collection and production planning and control (PPC) in the ETO environment. The research approach used here was a case study at an electrical transformer manufacturing plant located in Sweden. However, this study has also considered benchmarking companies as well to achieve the result of this study. Data collection techniques used were interviews, observation, and an extensive literature review that has guided the realization of the aim and gave a base to the suggested improvement for the problems identified. The findings of this master thesis illustrated that there is a lack of detailed plans, detailed information, manual effort, and lack of IT development which negatively impacts the performance of PPC. Furthermore, this had a strong correlation with the still manual shopfloor data collection that many ETO companies rely on. Principles that can be employed to mitigate the effects are further discussed in detail throughout the thesis.