Autor: Manfred Grauer

During the launch phase thousands of vehicles are produced in order to supply the dealer at the announced commercial launch. At the early production stage quite a number of repair and retrofit jobs are done. It is not possible to park the repaired or retrofitted cars in an orderly manner. The cars are brought to other regions of the plant site, thus the result is a chaotic parking and the cars cannot be found back in time. The produced cars have to stay at the plant site until the approval from business is given. After the approval the cars have to be delivered to the dealer. Due to the chaotic parking systems the searching for specific vehicles causes a lot of extra workload internally. In order to save costs and time OEMs implement Real-time Location Systems (RTLS) based on RFID to guarantee an accurate location follow-up of parking cars. This paper describes the deployment of passive RTLS on the Ford plant site. Hereby the focus will be on the inter-corporate use with suppliers in ...

Enterprises of the manufacturing industry have to come to precise decisions about technical and operational aspects of the product particularly in the knowledge-intensive, early phases of the product lifecycle because of increasing pressure concerning cost and competition. This can be supported by efficient reuse of the knowledge captured in product data of historical projects. At the same time, intern IT-systems as well as those of the partners in collaborative environments have to be included. Support of knowledge-intensive processes by similarity analysis in product- and process-data in heterogeneous environments is subject of this article.

In many enterprises applying product data management, the level of implementation does not correspond to the best available technology and the enterprises’ real requirements. Also for many different reasons, basic functions in process-oriented support of change management are often used only rudimentarily. Subject of this article is a concept to support particular enterprises of make-to-order production in implementing general change management based on up-to-date functions of product data management. The available core competences are efficiently applied in order to overcome the difficulties that are associated with the reutilization of existing methods of resolution.

Small and medium enterprises (SME) in the automotive supplier industry are facing rising demands concerning cost and quality of the parts or assemblies they are manufacturing for their cus-tomers. Additionally, the “time-to-market” has to be reduced. Applying traditional methods for rationalization is not sufficient to cope with these requirements. Furthermore, flexible, open, and efficient business processes and technologies are required in the early stages of the product life cycle. In this contribution, the potential of solution approaches based on collaborative, virtual product and process design and optimization is introduced. An example of a metal forming process in automotive supplier industry is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.