The Progressive Emergence of Product Variety in the Japanese Automobile Industry

Due to product variety and modeling structure, the automotive manufacturing process requires state-of-the art production methods that cause a high complexity level in operations which assembly operators work in a mixed-assembly environment. To maintain a competitive advantage, companies should take a different approach that considers the methodologies which ensure excellence in operations. This study aims to identify and prioritize potential risk factors that cause errors and failures by applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process to improve the production quality in a manufacturing process of mixed model assembly lines in the automobile industry. Thus, numerous risk factors under three main categories including human-focused, design and process-driven are discussed in this work. The most important contribution of this study is the application of this methodology to find and rank the risk factors based on their importance in a world-leading automotive company in Turkey.

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Effects of cooling rate on the mechanical properties of dual phase treated vanadium steels

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100074896 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 41 ◽

pp. 220-221

Author(s):

L.J. Chen ◽

H.C. Cheng ◽

J.R. Gong ◽

J.G. Yang

Keyword(s):

Mechanical Properties ◽

Cooling Rate ◽

Automobile Industry ◽

High Strength ◽

Weight Percent ◽

Low Alloy Steels ◽

Dual Phase ◽

Resource Requirement ◽

Alloy Steels ◽

Potential Weight

For fuel savings as well as energy and resource requirement, high strength low alloy steels (HSLA) are of particular interest to automobile industry because of the potential weight reduction which can be achieved by using thinner section of these steels to carry the same load and thus to improve the fuel mileage. Dual phase treatment has been utilized to obtain superior strength and ductility combinations compared to the HSLA of identical composition. Recently, cooling rate following heat treatment was found to be important to the tensile properties of the dual phase steels. In this paper, we report the results of the investigation of cooling rate on the microstructures and mechanical properties of several vanadium HSLA steels.The steels with composition (in weight percent) listed below were supplied by China Steel Corporation: 1. low V steel (0.11C, 0.65Si, 1.63Mn, 0.015P, 0.008S, 0.084Aℓ, 0.004V), 2. 0.059V steel (0.13C, 0.62S1, 1.59Mn, 0.012P, 0.008S, 0.065Aℓ, 0.059V), 3. 0.10V steel (0.11C, 0.58Si, 1.58Mn, 0.017P, 0.008S, 0.068Aℓ, 0.10V).

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