Autor: Rouven Nickel

The day-to-day business of the forging industry is characterized by fluctuating order quantities and production of numerous variants. Within the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 489 “Process chain for the manufacturing of precision forged high performance components” a simulation based approach was developed for the implementation of operative tool management to evaluate new technological and organizational measures for enhancing the tool life of tools used for precision forging.

In the planning phase of cyclically interlinked production lines neural networks are used to learn and forecast the characteristics of these systems. To increase the results of learning and to accelerate the training this paper presents a method, based on genetic algorithms, that reduces the attributes to describe the behaviour of the production lines.

Expert knowledge is doubtlessly the basis of all industrial activities - but it is no longer sufficient for professional success. Capacity for teamwork, interdisciplinary thinking and purposefulness often have the same significance. Many entrants will experience this in industrial practice - graduates of Hanover University have the chance to learn this as part of their studies. This paper presents the interdisciplinary Cooperative Product Engineering Project (KPE) and features last year’s participants’ results and success stories.

In cooperation with seven industrial enterprises of different branches the institute of Production Systems and Logistics developed in the course of a research project an IT-System for the Logistic Controlling of Production Processes. The project was funded by the Stiftung Industrieforschung. The IT-System supports logisticians of enterprises by the logistic controlling of production processes and by associated planning and design of improvements.

In its search for success factors that could ensure competitiveness, German industry has long recognized the potentials of the operational company organisation and of production logistics. Modern and intelligent production management combines these aspects and thus makes an important contribution to the economic success of an enterprise. The Bottleneck-oriented Logistics Analysis (BOLA) developed at the Institute of Production Systems and Logistics (IFA) of the University of Hanover is a method of logistic performance measurement, which supports production management by means of a logistic-oriented evaluation of production processes. In co-operation with a construction component manufacturer, IFA carried out a BOLA in a three-month project in order to uncover organisational and logistic potentials for improvement in the production department and to derive measures for exploiting these potentials.

Management literature reports on the trend for large companies to adopt the principles of the “learning organisation” or “lifelong learning”. They found “corporate universities” for educating their own staff, which are commonly based on computer-based or web-based educational services. The virtual institute VIMIMS offers an approach that is de-signed to offer small and medium enterprises access to up-to-date knowledge on production management without their having to invest substantial sums in internal further education programmes.