Autor: Horst Meier

The amount of resource efforts prevails with 46 % all other cost factors within classic manufacturing structures. Focusing on energy and labor costs as a source of raising companies profit seems no longer useful. Today, material costs of the manufacturing industry are about 500 billion euro per year, connected with a saving potential about approx. 100 billion euro. Also the belonging for sustainably produced products is still raising and is becoming a factor for a guaranteed purchase. Small and medium-sized enterprises fitted attempt, which helps increasing the transparency of internal processes and allows a resource driven ecological and economical assessment, is the main subject of this article.

Challenges of transformability have recently experienced great consideration within the field of scientific research. First empirical research has shown that the German term for transformability „Wandlungsfähigkeit” in many cases is used as a synonym for the term “flexibility”. Today’s scientific considerations on this topic mostly focus the technical aspects. However, further aspects such as human resources and organizational factors have to be implied in the present research on conditions that enable change processes. In the course of considerations about conditions the aspects of corporate culture and informal structures attain more attention. The evaluation is conducted as a business analysis and is complimented with qualitative interviews (informal structures). Through this first results and indicators for empowerers and constraints for change are identified.

Internal and external influences of change plus the steady examination with continuous as well as discontinuous change constitute a great challenge for industrial companies to be mastered. The improvement of production systems towards variable and unpredictable requirements caused by a variety of company-specific impacts will be increasingly focused. In this article a concept will be introduced which helps to identify and analyze company-specific change factors systematically.

Companies need several different software systems for the planning and control of products and services. The integration of products and services into an Industrial Product-Service System (IPS²) raises new requirements that are not met by current systems. Through Cloud Computing an IPS²-Execution System provides possibilities for planning and control of IPS² as well as communication between IPS² network partners.

The term “low carbon” has become a buzzword in recent years and has presented new challenges for the industry. For the manufacturing companies the first step to reach the “low carbon” goal is “low carbon manufacturing”, wherein the possibilities to reduce the CO2 emissions could be utilized during the manufacturing stage. So far, there is a lack of a holistic concept to determine and assess the production processes in consideration of CO2 emissions. This paper focuses on the emissions, which emit due to the use of energy, material and capital goods in the production. Here, the indirect emissions from suppliers are also being considered. Afterwards, a hybrid approach to determine the emissions is presented. With this approach the paper investigates the possibility of a comprehensive production optimization with respect to efficient resource usage and emission reduction at the planning stage.

Companies of the capital goods industry are more and more confronted with an increasing global competition. Furthermore the demand for a faster customisation of customers’ goods is accompanied by a decreasing product lifecycle. This circumstances lead to an uniting of companies to a value added chain which can more resist the increasing requirements of the industry. Sensitive data is consequently changed beyond the enterprise limits and the threat of product piracy is increasing to a higher level. Due to the increasing problem of product piracy this article describes the different comprehension of product piracy and explains a procedure strategy for providing of central knowledge. This described approach is not only limited to the enterprise limits. It can be used for the entire value added chain.

The German mechanical Engineering and plant construction industry has high potential risk for product piracy. The growing globalization leads to very complex and often non existing possibilities of law enforcements. Thus corporate demands are emerging for new strategies and methods against product piracy. This paper describes a concept for copy protection out of a systematic combination from an early technological implementation of controlled inter- and intraorganizational Know-how and sig-nal flows. Therefore operational and organizational aspects are reducing the risk of being copied. The described approach is not limited to the own company instead it will reconsider the whole value chain for a complete copy protection.

The dynamism in industrial markets and the increasing competition due to globalization and technological equivalence forces companies of the capital goods sector to rethink their business models. In this context customer solutions are considered as trendsetting. However, the individual solution of a customer’s problem poses a major challenge in terms of transforming from a product-centric mindset to a supplier of customized solution. This article analyzes to what extend the concept of mass customization can give incentives in order to successfully create and provide customer solutions.

Production Ramp-Ups are crucial for an industrial companies´ success. Business processes have to be controlled throughout the entire Production Network, what could be ensured by the use of modern workflow-based control methods. So far it is still questionable what should be the workflow’s goal. Looking at a ramp-up along the supply chain the process consists of a large number of local ramp-ups. For this a prognosis system will be introduced which allows an educated guess on the development of the number of pieces during the ramp-up. The prognosis is founded on a knowledge-based approach and does rely on multivariate data analysis. This will lead to a ramp-up forecast which could offer strategic aims into workflow-based network control tools.

In the past few years importance of strategic management increased. Although enterprises invest into the development of strategies, many strategy processes fail in implementation. Today an important factor of influence is respected intuitively only: The level of detail of strategy. This article introduces an industry-proved tool, which determines the right level of detail for a successful strategy-implementation. Furthermore it allows a monitoring of strategy formulation and implementation-situation.