Autor: Marc Brinkop

Today’s complexity in industrial production planning requires support by IT. In particular, Manufacturing Resources Planning (MRP) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are widely used. In some production environments these systems have disadvantages which do not allow a quick response to altered input information. Often manual production planning and control is more flexible and effective but requires adequate tools and standards. One solution has been developed and implemented for the construction of railway shunting switches and is described in this article.

Value-stream design is an analysis tool successfully used in industrial production. In addition to it, IAP GmbH has developed another tool, the so-called information-stream design which permits a detailed consideration of the planning processes. Here, particularly the temporal dependencies of processes and information streams are in the focus. By means of information-stream design, IAP has developed a product development process as a standard for SMEs which is described in this article.