Autor: Günter Graf

European companies which are producing on customers demand, have to face a highly turbulent competitive environment. The main challenges are short production cycles, high customer requirements, globalisation as well as competitors from developing countries. A solution to the resulting high dynamic and complexity are cooperative management approaches like supply chain management and the set up of specific flexibility potentials.

Changeability has become a buzzword for operations management, especially in German literature. Management of changeability, in contrast, has not yet been considered in practice or in literature sufficiently. The article presents an actors oriented approach for the management of changeability that enables a better composition and maintenance of change potentials in operation sys-tems. Change potentials are the unused abilities and relationships of actors and build up the changeability of an operation system. The management of changeability has to take care of these potentials for using i hemin the change process.

Due to heterogeneous standards of information systems in many indus-trial firms the planning- and execution systems are unconnected or incompatible. Therefore, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) combine ERP-, PDM/EDM- and automation systems. However, simultaneously an increase of the in-house usage of internet technologies in production occurs, such as active technologies, web service and industrial frame- works. They allow new production systems and concepts, driven by the direct, IP-based networking of all information and automation systems. Consequently, the general conditions of MES changes.