Autor: Horst Meier

Product Service Systems, as integrative combinations of material and service components, will increasingly establish themselves as an alternative to product-related services in mechanical and plant engineering. Systematic observation of new service offers demands a reorientation within the companies, which can be seen from the development to the end of the utilization of the bundle of services by the customer. This article describes the requirements to the company internal and cooperative organization, which are a necessary condition for the successful offer of product service systems.

The necessity to gain detailed knowledge about existing business processes is increasing continuously along with the complexity of the supply networks. The centre of the approach is therefore the modelling of inter-company business processes. Starting from the current requirements of the industry, the article describes a modelling method, which satisfies these demands while considering the supply feasibility. The presented modelling method is specified in the context of inter-company process controlling. Keywords:

The problems occurring during ramp-up processes of new products are usually of technical nature. They, however, feature a large-scale potential for causing or intensifying further problems in other fields of action during the project. Especially small and medium-sized companies suffer from the absence of appropriate documentation methods and proactive approaches for effective containment actions in case of conflicts. Looking at a ramp-up along the supply chain the process consists of a large number of local ramp-ups. Conventional project management methods do not offer suitable tools for this multi-level problem. A holistic ramp-up management needs to be developed.

Facing shorter product life cycles and ever changing customer requirements, production ramp-up processes are becoming one of the most decisive factors to stay in the market. In contrast to the automotive industry, where large scale information systems (IS) and simulation tools allow the build up of digital factories, small and medium sized enterprises (SME) lack resources to satisfy the corresponding organisational and IS-specific requirements. The focus of the research project ELAN is to develop an overall approach to manage production ramp-up adapted to the needs of SME.

production management is crucial to reduce time-to-market. Regarding ever-changing dynamic requirements that production systems have to meet there is a need of cooperative development and planning models, methods and tools. By that transparency in process organizations can be achieved as well as the availability of resources and competencies can be verified. The article de-scribes a resource-oriented collaborative engineering model to allow short and long term (re-)planning of production systems.

Business relation between customer and supplier is less characterized by purchase of investment goods. In terms of specific use tasks the functional utility of investment goods becomes of higher weight shortly. Within the new business relationship supplier becomes full-service-supplier and cus-tomer becomes user, as flexibility and availability are increasing. The definition contracting model used in plant engineering and construction describes the change from purchasing and property to acquisition by use. Due to the fact that it is a complex term, realizable types and physical forms of contracting models are presented below. Based on this, first experiences with contracting models are presented, future significance of contracting models is calculated, possible short-ages are identified as well as the need to act which hinder an implementation of contracting models yet.

In a highly competitive environment characterized by decreasing life cycles, lower profit margins and a stronger individualization of products enterprises are forced to adopt new strategies to stand the challenges of the market. The article describes the framework of an integrated complexity management including methods, models and information technology for the identification, the control, the reduction and the prevention of activities without any productivity in direct and indirect sectors of the supply chain.