Which variety is free? Discerning the impact of product variety in the process industry

In the pursuit of mass customization, it is a great challenge for companies to maintain mass production efficiencies while producing a wide range of prod-ucts. This poses an even a greater challenge to process industry manufactur-ing systems which are built for high volume, low variety operations and which are sensitive to changes in process parameters.

Many studies have been performed to quantify the impact of product variety on the efficiency of automotive assembly processes, but little work has been done to address pro-cess manufacturing systems. This study aims to determine the effects of in-dividual product features on machine productivity at a process industry manufacturer.

A lasso regression model is developed and tested using actual product and process level data from a stone wool manufacturer in central Eu-rope. Results show that product features are less correlated to machine effi-ciency than process parameters, such as planning and crew performance.