Autor: Marcus Schröter

Shorter product life cycles and rising demands for product variants increasingly lead to capacity demand fluctuations and result in unsatisfactory degrees of assembly system capacity utilization. By offering additional assembly capacities to their customers, manufacturers of assembly systems can establish a promising new business model. If the assembly system manufacturer takes over the responsibility for operating assembly systems, it has to be decided which HR option, recruiting own employees or leasing personnel from a temporary employment agency is best suited for this new business model. In this article a System Dynamics model is introduced that can be used for the assessment of such alternative HR concepts.

Since assembly represents the last stage of the production process before the finished parts are delivered to the end user, it poses high demands on flexibility. By offering service-based business models, producers of assembly systems can support their customers and contribute to a productive and highly flexible assembly process. Particularly deployment of temporary workers conduces to a high level of flexibility. Nevertheless, before implementing a new business concept, advantages and disadvantages of employing temporary workers need to be compared to benefits and drawbacks of the allocation of permanent employees. This article offers decision support for producers of assembly systems and for their customers as well.