Autor: Bernd Scholz-Reiter

Organizational learning offers a good possibility for enterprises to compete with the dynamics of the market. Under certain conditions, process integrated education not only leads to process optimization in the firms, but also to the beginning of organizational learning. This is of great importance particularly to small and medium sized enterprises, since they normally lack appropriate structures.

Autonomous control strategies for production logistic processes have already demonstrated their effectiveness on the shop-floor level. This article can be understood as a proof of concept: It is exemplarily shown that a pheromone-based autonomous control strategy can lead to better performance than a central control system when applied to a production network regarding production and transport logistic processes in a holistic way.

In the conflict between greater customer requirements and a diversification in production industry, companies are forced to reduce ramp-up times significantly. The trend towards a continuous reduction of the time-to-market puts pressure on these companies and addresses the realisation of the expected market entry. More often this results in an inefficient production run-up, because the reduction in development time poses an important factor for later product changes. With regard to shorter product life cycles, it is expected that time for production and distribution will be extended. Cost-intensive product changes will reduce profit, which is why product change management becomes more and more important. Nevertheless, the effective management of process changes is not addressed sufficiently by today’s research. These in particular can be defined as most critical factors for an efficient production run-up.

The product change is a natural component of the development process and arises in the framework of a continuous improvement and refinement of planning inevitably. Ideally a constant information gain in the process of planning leads to a revision and an alteration of existing acceptance and concepts. A special case of the change is described by the Product Change Propagation. A local products change reproduces itself global and leads to a number of subsequent product changes, which can be measured heavily. In the complex planning surrounding the effect of a product change can be mostly not promptly recognised and will have complex correction loops as a consequence. This paper offers, aligned to the process organisation, a system-oriented approach for the early identification of planning inconsistencies by subsequent product changes.

For an efficient implementation of technical product changes, industrial companies need to use a goal-oriented procedure as well as an effective application of already existing knowledge about previous product changes. Mostly, product changes are implemented by using standardised workflows, which are controlled and documented by common workflow-management-systems. The administration effort of these systems often causes delayed implementation of product changes. In this context companies try to optimise the product change process by implementing new application systems and by integrating existing isolated applications in these systems. The organisation of subgroups, who finally implement the product change, is often neglected. Thereby, the development of new approaches in this area may close the gaps in order to make knowledge available.

The implementation of object-identification without contact by Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) is in the meantime taken into consideration by many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to enhance on the one hand their internal workflows in production and logistics and on the other hand to satisfy customer demands. However, in the last years only little or superficial knowledge of this technology has been acquired. Hence, qualified and certified training for dealing with RFID is highly necessary. Process security shall thus be guaranteed internally and uniform standards within the supply chain regarding the implementation and application of RFID, can be substantiated.

The paper describes a game called the Supply Net Game, built around the structure of a production supply network based on the “anchoring and adjustment heuristic” which is known as the one people use to make inferences about uncertain events. The game involves four players where everyone manages his manufacturing unit that consists of four production lines which proceed to the joint development of products with the other units. While planning production and controlling inventories, every person should try to minimize the costs caused by both holding items on stock and being in an out-of stock situation. The paper stresses the valuable impact of management games for production engineering education in general and particularly the significance of learning implicit skills as well as gaining insight in inventory control and management of complex distributed production systems such as the system dynamics production network model introduced in the paper.

Recent investigations concerning the international state of the art of micro production technology [1, 2] showed, that it has to be distinguished between two main development directions regarding the manufacturing of function units on the one hand as well as complete products on the other hand. First of all there are the classical precision engineering oriented manufacturing methods [3, 4], e.g. according to the DIN 8580 [5]. Secondly manufacturing methods from the area of microsystems technology have been observed [3, 4]. The integration process of different product functions into one part or component geometry, which is running parallel to the miniaturisation, is a specific challenge regarding the field of micro manufacturing [1]. This affects especially the product and production process development, concerning the precision engineering oriented manufacturing methods. This paper addresses problems regarding the operations management of precision-engineering-oriented micro-production ...

The management of production ramp-up of complex series products is one of the critical success factors for companies. Shorter ramp-up phases become more important for companies because an early time-to-market means extra gains right after market launch. Nevertheless, reduction of production ramp-up is mostly realised by time savings in the phase of product development. This is one of the reasons for a lot of product changes, which occur during production ramp-up and whereby original equipment manufacturers as well as suppliers are forced to renew already used series tools. To reduce unnecessary expense of tool replacement a forward displacement and a faster implementation of technical product changes are required. In this context the product change classification offers significant but until today unused potentials.

For the implementation of autonomous control of transport processes it is tried to transfer well known and approved routing protocols from data communication to transport problems. Here structural differences between data and transportation networks prevent a direct transfer of the protocols, so that several different, particularly adapted protocols with different targets must cooperate in transportation networks. In the following a concept for autonomous controlled transport networks, called “Distributed Logistics Routing Protocol”, is introduced, developed at the CRC 637 “Autonomous Control of Logistic Processes” in Bremen.