The SFIT tool: Supporting assembly planners to deal with new product variants

Increasing the number of product variants expected by the customers; decreasing product life cycles; operating existing production systems as long as possible, all these factors make the planning of new or the reconfiguration of existing assembly systems a complex and time-consuming task. Yet assembly planners lack adequate tool support in taking the right decisions by such competitive goals and to handle this complexity. In this paper, we present a tool which supports the modelling of the different relevant aspects in a clearly independent way such as products, assembly lines, processes and especially the explicit relationships between these aspects such as which process step is executed on which station or which part is used in which process step. Having the information clearly input by the user, various analyses can be provided to support the assembly planner in his/her design decisions.