Painting the 3Daycar: Developing a New Approach to Automotive Coatings and Lean Manufacture

Automotive painting is essential not only for providing a flawless and emissions free system of body coating, but as a key enabler of customer order fulfillment. Paint shops in the UK and Europe continue to require large batch-sizes, long lead-times and suffer from high levels of defects. This represents considerable waste in the system, contrary to the principles of lean manufacture and building-to-order. This research suggests that the role of the paint shop may be changing, where the emphasis on production is moving towards customer-pull, total system reliability and batch sizes of one. Whilst the advance in water-borne and powder technology are likely to remain of an incremental nature, new manufacturing concepts such as alternative body construction and thermoplastic in-molded color panel technology, may radically change how coatings are applied during vehicle production.