Autor: Philipp Hertz

Due to increased global competition as well as decreasing product margins industrial services are becoming increasingly important also in manufacturing companies. In parallel, the complexity of the service networks necessary to perform the different services continuously rises, leading to major challenges for these companies. In order to meet these challenges, companies rely on improved transparency. An important tool to achieve this is the introduction of KPIs to measure the performance of industrial services. In this paper we present results of an ongoing research project and describe the essential performance dimensions that must be considered for the planning and control of industrial service networks.

Due to a difficult market situation represented by the world economic and related market crisis and a steady growth of model-variety the automotive industry is facing major challenges: short innovation cycles, increased complexity of production and cost pressures. To respond to these challenges advanced approaches for long-term planning of production systems have to be implemented. This paper presents approaches of plant design utilizing digital factory and shows applications of operations research (OR) for the planning of production systems. The application of OR methods holds significant potential not only for the network planning level but also for supporting strategic decisions on the production system level.