Autor: Peter Nyhuis

These days, competitive advantages for manufacturing companies can not be achieved by a detached configuration of specific processes but only within an inte-grative configuration of the complete system factory. The deployed technologies and the manufactured products have a significant influence on the configuration of a factory. To allow a better coordination between technology, product and factory planning, an approach for integrated factory coordination has been developed at the Hannover Centre for Production Techno-logy (PZH). This approach is based on the general roadmapping idea and allows the systematisation of the information transfer concerning content and time between factory, technology and product planning.

The development of changeable factory concepts influences the site competitiveness of producing companies. The impact of the underlying factory structure, the factory layout, and the logistics on the operating efficiency of a factory concept is unquestioned. The influence of future production technologies or products on the factory concept, however, is often neglected. In a cooperative project a new method has been derived which allows a holistic coordination of all three elements factory, technology and product.

Enterprises face a plethora of outside influences. Examples include shortening product life cycles, rising cost pressure or increasing number of variants. In order to make arrangements for their factories to remain future-robust, many companies strive for a transformable factory. In order to fully use the change-potential installed, a methodology that allows integrating an employee-oriented view, is indispensable. This contribution presents an approach which renders possible the coordination of employee skills and factory transformability.

„Gentelligence“ is a neologism and describes the property of parts to save, store and process data (intelligence) and further to pass information on to following generations of parts (genetic). Unlike existing technologies the gentelligent technology is able to store information without the physical separation of part and information. The present article highlights the potentials of gentelligent parts in assembly control and factory structuring.

To excel global players have to satisfy a multitude of requirements nowadays. Contradicting targets have to be resolved by value chain design on a regular basis, taking into consideration the complex setting of necessary decisions. This article explains how to identify and evaluate measures showcasing the source process.

Today globalization is a common challenge companies have to cope with. Cost aspects are still playing an essential role in this context. To ensure a long-term profitability, companies also have to consider non-monetary factors like core-competences. Besides globalization the increasing rate of ramp-ups caused by decreasing product life-cycles is a big challenge for companies. This article will introduce approaches to deal with the conflict of objectives between cost-reduction, safe-guarding of core-competences and ramp-up of production systems.

Change Management and transformability of factories are usually not planned in an integrated way today. While Change Management focuses solely on the change process itself, this process is mostly ignored in the planning process of a transformable factory. The synthesis of these two approaches allows a holistic support of change processes, in order to promote innovations for example, upgrade employee competencies and use the planned technological, spatial and organisational transformability thoroughly.

In the conflict between greater customer requirements and a diversification in production industry, companies are forced to reduce ramp-up times significantly. The trend towards a continuous reduction of the time-to-market puts pressure on these companies and addresses the realisation of the expected market entry. More often this results in an inefficient production run-up, because the reduction in development time poses an important factor for later product changes. With regard to shorter product life cycles, it is expected that time for production and distribution will be extended. Cost-intensive product changes will reduce profit, which is why product change management becomes more and more important. Nevertheless, the effective management of process changes is not addressed sufficiently by today’s research. These in particular can be defined as most critical factors for an efficient production run-up.

Current information technologies like bar codes or transponders offer an enormous potential to logistics of producing companies. But with these technologies the provision of information on processes or components along the value-adding chain is neither possible in real-time nor consistently. Future components should be able to store information on themselves, so that additional transponders are no longer required. This opens up new possibilities for a real-time production planning and control as well as for the segmentation and planning of factories.

Due to the complexity of the interdependencies in enterprise logistics, manufacturing companies often have difficulties in meeting their logistic objectives. They struggle to take measures that effectively influence their logistic performance. The Institute of Production Systems and Logistics (IFA) is developing illustrative models that describe and quantify the logistic interdependencies. The models form a basis for strategies and procedures, with which manufacturing controls can control the interdependencies.