The manufacturing industry is faced with a market environment that continuously grows more competitive. Achieving a short time to market is of vital importance to manufacturing companies that are characterized by low-volumes and high customization due to the already existing long lead times. An important process that transfers a product from design concept to production is the product industrialization process. This process plays a critical role as an interface between product development and production and any interruptions can have a significant effect on the overall time to market of a product. Research on the industrialization process and its challenges have mostly been conducted within a high-volume manufacturing, but what is currently lacking is exploring this process from the perspective of low-volume manufacturing. A case study was conducted within a low volume large equipment manufacturing company, analyzing their product industrialization process. The purpose of this article is to identify challenges within the process as well as to identify the effects these challenges have on the industrialization process. The findings from this case study identified 10 challenges within the low volume industrialization process that were grouped into four categories, relating to organizational, standardization, external, and technological factors.

Reducing lead times and quickly introducing new products to the market is becoming increasingly more important for low-volume manufacturing. This has led to management principles such as manufacturing and design integration to accelerate the time to market of new products, which puts immense pressure on the new product development (NPD) process. Since it is both time-intensive and a critical interface between manufacturing and design, requiring a significant amount of data to be transferred between these two functions and their systems. Successful integration between manufacturing and design requires a robust product data infrastructure, with high levels of technical interoperability to facilitate effective data flow between systems. However, research on the topic of technical interoperability and its impact on manufacturing and design integration within NPD processes is limited. A longitudinal case study was conducted at a low-volume development site, wherein an NPD process, and its product data infrastructure were analysed from a technical interoperability perspective. The purpose of this article is to explore the potential of technical interoperability within manufacturing and design integration, by identifying bottlenecks within a NPD process. The findings from this case study identified two systems lacking technical interoperability, the product data management (PDM) system and the customer requirements database. Causing negative impacts such as increased manual administrative load, late design revisions and extended lead times. From the discussion it can be derived that by increasing the technical interoperability of said systems, the aforementioned issues can be mitigated, enhancing the overall manufacturing design integration.