Autor: Christian Nedeß

Fabrication and assembly processes - in which the manual work processes play an important role related to a high probability of errors and interruptions - can be planned with the production simulation, if the simulation approach is adapted to the robust planning method. This article shows for the example of shipbuilding, how the simulation user benefits from the scenario-based process model for the preparation and management of the simulation scenarios. Additionally a systematic evaluation method simplifies the interpretation of the simulation results in order to assess the robustness of the planning alternatives.

Competence in building more innovative ships will help the German Maritime Industry guaranteeing its existence under competitive conditions in respect to Asia. The realistic visualisation with Virtual Reality (VR) enables the demonstration of the shipyard’s design competence to the customer in an early stage as well as the discussion of design decisions and their implications between ship yard and supplier. Using the example of shipbuilding, the article shows which changes in the business processes of a company are essential for an efficient use of VR and which add-ons are necessary for a user-oriented ease of operation.

industrial enterprises to permanently develop new strategies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Besides product innovations, services complementing these products are increasingly used for differentiation purposes. But only the right combination of different services forming a service portfolio allows successful service offering. Therefore, a systematic engineering approach is required to compose a service portfolio that fits to a company’s potentials as well as to customer requirements. However, until today this aspect of service engineering is not continuously and systematically supported.

Increasing international competition forces German companies to enhance their portfolio of products and services. Facing this strategic decision, the required competencies for successful market positioning have to be analyzed. Such target-oriented investments in competencies of the employees allow companies to gain an outstanding competitive position. Best practice examinations have proven a positive relation between competence investments on the one hand and market attractiveness of products and services as well as employment situation on the other hand. Yet today, there is a lack of systematic and continuous controlling of competence development processes on a strategic level.

Unlike common opinion the efficiency of product development projects can be increased by the application of workflow-management-systems. The basis for this provides a reference model for workflow-supported product development which classifies the required workflow types and software tools for the different tasks in the project. For the frequent case of a change management process it will be shown how different variants of this process can be configured through workflow modules and which interdependencies between workflow and project management system occur.

The competitiveness of the German industry is depending on its capability to develop and build innovative and thereby better products than other companies. In the future the lead in technical competence of the employees will be the most differentiating factor from international competitors especially in complex production processes. For assessing the competencies of the employees regarding their significance for a company’s strategy as well as for deriving meaningful indicators competence profiles on the team level have to be developed. Starting from that the required competencies for maintaining and expanding the competitiveness can continuously be pursued in the “Kompetenz Monitor”.

The cooperative production of industrial goods and services in networks is a key success factor for a large number of companies. However, inter-organisational cooperation does not only lead to new opportunities in a competitive environment but additional risks can also arise. These risks have to be assessed and controlled by a systematic deployment of advanced risk management methods during all phases of a cooperation’s life cycle. Therefore, this article shows which approaches should be chosen and which constraints have to be considered.

The analysis of maintenance tasks in shipbuilding by using virtual reality (VR) technologies offers significant capabilities of minimizing the maintenance costs. In order to reach these capabilities, it is necessary to develop a data model to support the required variant construction in VR. Additionally the efficient integration of the VR software components into a typical IT environment has to be taken into account.