Autor: Jochen Deuse

The implementation and adaption of the Toyota Production System during the 90’s of the last century brought a significant change to the organization of production especially in large scale and mass production for example automotive industries. This change is especially evident for the functioning of material supply. Before the organizational change workers in manufacturing and assembly had to manage the supply of materials mostly on their own. Nowadays this function is handled by the logistics department in most cases. The advantage of this reorganization was a stronger concentration of workers on their main tasks. In the beginning the change process in material supply was considered very skeptically. Today most experts are certain that producing industries cannot meet rising market requirements without an efficient logistics department. This fact is especially true for manufacturing and assembly in high wage countries like Germany. Till now the described change process has not yet ...

Since the beginning of the 1990s the business environment of manufacturing industries has changed permanently. A majority of production systems have a lean, cost-effective and process-oriented structure. But this is still not enough for being successful in the long-term. The key factor for meeting challenges of a global market is the changeability of production systems. Instead of their recurring re-planning and rescheduling, they should be designed changeable right from the beginning of the planning phase. Time data is an important calculation and planning basis for this. In this paper we present a concept for dynamic time data management in planning and designing changeable production systems.

Regarding the optimisation of capacity utilisation the increasing product diversity has been an unsolved problem in job lot production for a long time. State of the art for solving such problems is the concept Heijunka, which means “levelled production”. The application of group technology offers the possibility to utilise this concept with regard to a low volume and high mixed production. In this context the characteristics of job lot production are investigated. Referring to these characteristics the concept Heijunka used in mass and serial production is adapted. The approach was applied in collaboration with Robert Bosch GmbH.

A crucial criterion for the competitiveness of logistic areas (besides the efficency of logistic processes) is cost transparency, i. e. the cost allocation to performed logistic services. Since logistic processes unlike production processes do not generate material goods but services, it is very common to find cost structures where traditional cost accounting systems lead to distortion of costs. Activity-based costing facilitates process-oriented cost calculation and cost allocation to service processes.