Autor: Peter Nyhuis

The design of the supply concept re-presents a decisive competitive factor for companies, since this significantly affects the throughput time and inventory levels. This paper explains how environmental issues can be quantified in addition to the conventional types of costs and presents a method for the selection and design of a supply concept.

Nowadays, companies deal with a hugh amount of challenges which are the reason to change the production system more and more often. To be able to do this a production system needs a sufficient degree of changeability. Caused on a change, a communication process between the user and supplier will be initialized. In an optimal communication process there will be no losses due to communication lacks. This article deals with a change-specific taxonomy which adds some items to a communication process to decrease losses during communication.

The planning and control of regeneration processes, especially those with complex investment goods, comprises a high level of requirements. In order to efficiently design capacity planning and tuning despite fuzzy load information, this paper presents a database model that serves as ascertainment of this information.

Today there is a big challenge for producing companies to improve their energy efficiency. Generally, a lot of separate measures are performed to optimize energy efficiency of objects in a factory. Because of a missing holistic consideration of interdependencies between the objects in a factory, a huge potential to save energy is completely ignored. To encounter this obvious weak point, the developed method, which is descripted in this article, enables to valuate and design energy efficient factories considering the interdependencies. The factory is observed on two different levels of detail. The method is focused on small and medium-sized factories.

Lot sizing is a substantial factor of economic production. There are various lot sizing approaches considering the same cost factors in different ways. Their results are usually quite similar. A common weakness of all lot sizing approaches is the limited consideration of relevant cost factors. The costs which are neglected usually rise with increasing lot sizes. This leads to illusory exact results because too large lots are calculated generally. This paper compares functions and results of different lot sizing approaches and discusses neglected cost factors.

Nowadays, companies are facing a rapidly changing environment. New products have to be integrated into established manufacturing processes at ever shorter intervals. To assure competitiveness the design of changeable production systems gains more and more importance. Therefore, a control loop of changeability has been developed within the research project “change-supporting process architectures”. The control loop empowers companies to identify urgent changeability needs with an evaluation method and helps them to design and use change-supporting process architectures with economical solutions. The presented article focuses on the methodology for the evaluation of changeability.

In an increasingly turbulent environment, today enterprises are confronted with the challenge of aligning available capacities with the capacities required using targeted measures. An approach is presented to support the selection of measures quantitatively.

environment poses huge challenges to production enterprises, especially with regards to logistics. The Logistic Operating Curve Theory, developed at the Institute of Production Systems and Logistics (IFA), is a recognized approach to describing logistic interactions, nevertheless, it reaches its limits when it comes to the dynamic aspects. In order to facilitate a timely and optimal Logistic Positioning a method is developed for quickly and reliably identifying dynamic processing states.

Due to increased customer requirements the product quality has become a precondition for the competitiveness of manufacturers. Fundamental for the production of top-quality products are stable and error-free processes. The basic process configuration takes place during the factory planning. If substantial quality related standards are not taken into account at this time, essential modifications could only be realized during the subsequent factory operations with a significant additional effort. Therefore a methodical approach for the planning of quality supportive factories which early integrates the relevant requests in the planning processes is developed at the Institute of Production Systems and Logistics (IFA) of the Leibniz University of Hannover.

Companies nowadays face a plethora of challenges such as ever increasing customer requirements, globally distributes production networks or changing product life cycles. In order to react appropriately to these turbulences, production systems can be designed changeable. Today’s solutions often do not suffice. In particular, the needed time and the necessary extent of change are identified only intuitively. In this paper is presented a control-loop-based synchronization approach, which allows carrying out the change in the right quantity at the right time. An application example will further the theoretical bases.