Autor: Steffen Reinsch

As a consequence of the increasing globalization many industrial companies see themselves forced to secure their competitive ability by an internationalization of their production locations. This requires a long-term planning of the future product structures and process chains, in order to control the variant variety and to protect the core competences. Objectives of the described method are a generation of variants close to the market and a bundling of the core competences.

The presented survey results aim to show an overview about the existing demand volatility and capacity flexibility in German manufacturing companies of the machining industry. Besides the consideration of logistical aspects regarding flexible capacities, cost aspects for accounting impacts of capacity options were taken into account. The result of the survey clarifies that the capacity options in companies seem to be sufficient. The cause of logistical problems due to demand volatility is located in insufficient methods for production monitoring.

Today’s industrial market is driven by a continuous demand of innovations. In order to improve product quality and to shorten manufacturing time, many companies are substituting old technologies and machines by new ones. However, an effective implementation of a new technology presumes the consideration of all logistic aspects related to it. Because each technology and each machine has different technical and logistic parameters, the implementation in an already existing process chain may require new methods for the logistic planning and control. In this paper the impact of a new technology on the logistic behaviour of the process chain is presented.