All depends on what your line rate is.

If you want to make one machine a day, you've got inifinte possibilities on how to set up your work flow.

If you want to make one machine a minute, you've got to be highly compartmentalized and have *everything* be standardized work. No possible way to build quality in the high-volume environment without all tasks/tools/procedures/parts being highly specialized.

Being a former automotive plant quality engineer (helped build SUVs for 7 years), I noticed a lot of improvements from the automotive world I could apply to a pinball assembly line. Items such as;

Quality gates - building quality in-station and eliminating issues before they're passed down-stream.
Andon - Emprowering the assemblers to notify of quality issues and even stop the line if needed.
Tooling fixtures and jigs - helps reduce build variations.
Mutilation protection - Now that pinballs are collector/art pieces, taking care to avoid scratches/dents/etc....

I could go on-and-on....

Later,
EV

Robots are nice, but you need very tight GD&T (geometric dimensioning and tolerance) to have them be useful. As in, around +/- 0.5mm or so. Plus, robots are expensive.

In a typical auto assembly plant, the only truly robotic functions are the welders that put the body shell together, the paint booths, and the fixed glass install. Everything else is carried along conveyors to operator work stations and assembled by hand.

For pinball, I would imagine that you could automate the assembly of the cabinet, but that's about it.

Later,
EV