Abstract
Project manufacturing companies produce complex and highly specialized products for unique purposes, such as customized machinery and plants, buildings, ships, oil rigs, or specialty vehicles. These products are usually single units or small batches, specifically developed, manufactured, assembled and commissioned in an interdisciplinary project organization following an approach also known as Engineer-to-Order (ETO). Managing these complexities of projects and processes under time and budget restrictions and unpredictable market demands often results in numerous non-value-added activities that reduce efficiency and productivity in the organization and along the entire supply chain. To reduce the impact of these wastes and losses and remain competitive, project manufacturing companies are seeking proven and tested productivity improvement strategies to better their operations. Strategies, methods, and tools from Lean Production have been successfully applied for decades in repetitive product-centered manufacturing environments, such as the automotive industry, but face several barriers when attempted to be implemented in non-repetitive settings, such as the ETO environment. This thesis uses a systematic literature review and empirical studies to first examine and classify the barriers to the adoption of Lean in project manufacturing, which are related to organization, knowledge, management, culture, finances, ETO-specific context, and customers. The application of emerging technologies from the fourth industrial revolution has been suggested as a potential solution to help mitigate barriers to Lean adoption, but very few studies examine how exactly Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies might help, particularly in project manufacturing environments. To investigate this practically, empirical data was collected by means of a questionnaire survey followed by semi-structured interviews in an exploratory multiple case study involving 17 companies with an ETO strategy in the construction, customized machinery, and shipbuilding sectors. The results show that several of the project manufacturers analyzed are already using I4.0 technologies to minimize barriers to implementing Lean in their organizations. However, it also became clear that numerous obstacles have not yet been addressed. In addition, the case companies studied reported that further I4.0 technologies to reduce Lean adoption barriers are being discussed and field-tested but have not yet been applied in a permanent way. To explore the findings in more detail, a single in-depth case study was conducted using I4.0 technologies Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Augmented Reality (AR) to reduce specific barriers to Visual Management (VM) adoption in construction. Future research is needed to find out which I4.0 applications can be used to mitigate further Lean obstacles in the ETO context and if and how barriers to implementing I4.0 technologies can be mitigated.