Autor: Wilhelm Dangelmaier

Flexible work times are a new opportunity to enhance the competitiveness of producing companies. To exploit this opportunity it must be considered during production planning and control. Available PPC and ERP systems do not sufficiently support the matching of required staff capacity and available (and paid) capacity. In this contribution we present the support of this matching process by the software OOPUS WEB.

Shorter product lifecycles, customer-oriented production and raising variants of the manufactured goods are representative for today’s industries. One well-established method for planning, safeguarding and improvement of production processes is the material flow simulation. In order to cover all phases of the process development, a backward-simulation approach beside the usual method is needed. The generated simulation results are moreover to be integrated in “control centre”-views, wherefore a time-oriented execution of the simulation has to be added. This article shows some functions of the material flow simulator d³FACT insight, which already allows to execute simulation models in forward or backward direction, as well as a time-oriented simulation.

The increasing coupling of software applications leads to complex integration scenarios in many companies. Doing this successfully requires well-harmonized concepts and tools. One promising approach is the product “Exchange Infrastructure” of the SAP AG, which is discussed in this article.