Autor: Stefan Schröder

The steadily alternating requirements for industrial companies implicate the challenge to enhance production systems. In such a turbulent as well as dynamic environment, companies must be enabled to act and react quickly. Therefore they have to be equipped with appropriate technologically and organizationally realizable as well as economically rentable options. Within this paper, a methodical approach for a systematic and individual configuration of production systems is presented in order to solve the depicted problems.

Challenges of transformability have recently experienced great consideration within the field of scientific research. First empirical research has shown that the German term for transformability „Wandlungsfähigkeit” in many cases is used as a synonym for the term “flexibility”. Today’s scientific considerations on this topic mostly focus the technical aspects. However, further aspects such as human resources and organizational factors have to be implied in the present research on conditions that enable change processes. In the course of considerations about conditions the aspects of corporate culture and informal structures attain more attention. The evaluation is conducted as a business analysis and is complimented with qualitative interviews (informal structures). Through this first results and indicators for empowerers and constraints for change are identified.

Internal and external influences of change plus the steady examination with continuous as well as discontinuous change constitute a great challenge for industrial companies to be mastered. The improvement of production systems towards variable and unpredictable requirements caused by a variety of company-specific impacts will be increasingly focused. In this article a concept will be introduced which helps to identify and analyze company-specific change factors systematically.