Design guidelines for efficient development of customer adaptations

Abstract: Fit For Use (FFU) plays an important role in Scania’s mission of providing complete transport solutions, where the purpose of FFU is to mount customer-specific components on the trucks. Such details can include extra lights, decals, toolboxes etcetera, and are call FFU adaptations internally at Scania. As part of the Scania Production System (SPS), Scania continuously works with improvement work. As part of this work the development of FFU adaptations has been identified as an area which can be improved, which is the purpose of this thesis. The aim of this master thesis project is to create a handbook consisting of guidelines targeting project leaders and designers of the FFU department at Scania. The goal is to efficiently design customer adaptations; i.e. the emphasis is on the design phase of a Scania FFU project. Scania prefers that the handbook should be made in a short and concise fashion. Moreover, the guidelines should consider factors such as function, quality, cost and assemblability. In order to both become familiarized with the work of FFU as well as gathering information potentially useful for the handbook, several methods were employed: Studying internal Scania documents as well as published papers, participation in meetings and some work processes as well as spending a day as assembly operators. Additionally, interviews of employees both at FFU and other departments were interviewed to take advantage of their experience and opinions. The activities above enabled the identification of important aspects to be included in the handbook. The conclusions were that the handbook should include relevant DFMA principles, the FMEA working sheet, aspects on how to design products and assembly with regard to safety, reliability, sustainability, ergonomics, maintainability. As well as the strictly design-related ones, aspects relating to maintaining clear communication, feedback to and from different teams and reminders for where to find clarification and assistance are included. Also relevant for FFU development, some aspects regarding suppliers, customers, and the production phase are also included since they clearly affect the design phase. The style of the handbook is made with inspiration from Scania’s graphical image, and the guidelines in the handbook are presented as bullet points in order to make it short and concise, which corresponds to the requests of Scania. A decision was also made to create a set of principles for the development of FFU adaptations, which should guide the development, as well as the creation of new guidelines. Five principles were created, by considering the needs of FFU as well as the core values of Scania.