Autor: Holger Rudzio

Plant operators are getting more and more aware that operating costs are usually exceeding acquisition costs. For that reason there is an increased interest in methods like Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Weakness of these methods is their exclusive focus on costs. Because they do not allow differentiating benefits of various machines and plants, a holistic evaluation is difficult. The concept developed by the Institute of Production Engineering and Machine Tools (IFW) is concentrating on that issue, extending the Life Cycle Costing by a benefit assessment of investments.

Complexity will be characteristic for future economic and technological development. Highly integrated and customer-specific products, that are manufactured in short times and call for life-long services, pose demanding challenges for companies of all sizes. Life cycle orientation and product variety thus mean a new dimension of complexity for production management, knowledge engineering and general management. Consequently, in future it will not necessarily be the fastest, cheapest or technologically most advanced company, that will be most successful, but possibly the one that is able to cope with this growing complexity in the best way.