Autor: Axel Hahn

Production targets in the Smart Factory should be supported by digital control loops. This article will present a concept, which describes the structure of operational information flows as elements of a control loop. The term digital control loop encompasses technical control systems and business processes as well as integrating vertically and horizontally information from business applications. The common alignment of different aspects is adjusted to operational targets along the value added chain. The idea of using the digital control loop as an approach for this, is evaluated in a case study.

In process of digitalization the shop floor area, widespread potentials are given to design the form of the organizational process within. On the one hand a variety of opportunities between optimization and innovation are available as a score of the digitalization. On the other hand responsible managers have to create the most efficient form of organizational structure to support the transformation process itself. This article describes the necessity to evaluate the leading form of organizational structure related to efficient interaction of the commissioned implementing team. Based on published characteristics for evaluating the organizational structure which are relevant to design smart factories, a model with varying forms is visualized.

Due to increasing product complexity, quality, timing and resource constraints, the management of product development projects becomes more and more challenging. Especially the determination of current product quality, an indicator for the actual development status, is hard to accomplish. For this reason, the article presents a concept for a real-time quality estimation for products and intermediate results. The concept is used and evaluated in the semiconductor industry.

Development projects are prone to continuous changes, whether because of additional insights or changes of requirmenents. To execute changes in a controlled and traceable manner, standardized methods and processes are used in product development, often as part of configuration management. The IT-support of configuration management with defined workflows and release mechanisms is provided by product data management systems (PDM). However, these often fail to acknowledge organizational and financial effects of a change on project management. To remedy this deficit, the article proposes an integrated project/macro-product model implemented by a semantic web and an ontology. This integrated model can be used to run metrics to analyse technical and commercial effects of a change thus improving the change management process as a whole.

The development of new complex products is increasingly conducted cooperatively in distributed, heterogeneous organisations in a dynamic environment. To successfully accomplish a project, the coordination of project controlling is of vital importance. Each participant of the development network has individual controlling systems, which cover his information and management needs. For cross-project controlling however, the creation of interoperability between distributed systems is a precondition for the coordination of processes. The article describes a cross-project controlling approach, which fosters integration by semantic modelling.

An approach to the creation of interoperability in dynamically changing supply chains is presented applying the example of transnational hazardous waste logistics. By an integral consideration of business models the integration and adaptation of the IT infrastructure is advanced.

Product configuration systems are a key to efficient and customer-oriented sales processes for technical components and parts. A common model for product information and rules extended by a simple model of a decision tree simplifies the management of system data.