Autor: Tim Klemke

Nowadays, companies deal with a hugh amount of challenges which are the reason to change the production system more and more often. To be able to do this a production system needs a sufficient degree of changeability. Caused on a change, a communication process between the user and supplier will be initialized. In an optimal communication process there will be no losses due to communication lacks. This article deals with a change-specific taxonomy which adds some items to a communication process to decrease losses during communication.

Nowadays, companies are facing a rapidly changing environment. New products have to be integrated into established manufacturing processes at ever shorter intervals. To assure competitiveness the design of changeable production systems gains more and more importance. Therefore, a control loop of changeability has been developed within the research project “change-supporting process architectures”. The control loop empowers companies to identify urgent changeability needs with an evaluation method and helps them to design and use change-supporting process architectures with economical solutions. The presented article focuses on the methodology for the evaluation of changeability.

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.