Logistics

The efficient performance of service tasks on high-value capital goods like maintenance, repair and overhaul of aircrafts and railway vehicles is influenced by a turbulent environment. In this context, excellent production logistics in maintenance shops can be a way out to cope with this turbulence. This contribution describes a bottom-up approach which is the basis for improving the logistical processes by dimensioning material flow-oriented buffer stocks.

Despite increasing networking and electronic data interchange for many companies future demand curves are unstable. Resulting from demand fluctuations and deviations from planned processes, high requirements exist for production planning and control. The necessary flexibility to respond to such variations can be created by supply chain event management (SCEM). Based on the example of an automotive supplier process chain SCEM is defined and then implemented in an Advanced Planning and Scheduling System.

Having derived from the end consumer market, the idea of a sharing economy is currently increasing important in more and more economic branches. Even conservative industries such as logistics are now beginning to see the potential of resource sharing. This paper discusses the scope and conditions of transferring this approach to the field of offshore wind energy logistics. It will be shown that standardizing objects and processes as well as making supply and demand transparent are considered the basis for transferring resource sharing into offshore wind energy logistics.

The integration of information technologies in the production environment proceeds and is summarized under the term ’Industry 4.0’. As a consequence, new challenges and opportunities transform the risk landscape of supply chains substantially. Acknowledging this, our article outlines the impact of Industry 4.0 and formulates first recommendations for practitioners especially in the field of supply chain risk management.

Modern lean production systems require fast, stable and efficient logistics processes to guarantee just-in-time deliveries of materials to production. For this, a new logistics concept for a plant of the Brose group was developed, which consists of an automatic small parts storage system and an in-plant milk run system. One major challenge was the synchronization of the storage system and the milk run systems in a way that both systems are operated with even utilization and that no obstructions occur between milk run trains. To this end, a timetable was implemented which determines departure times of each milk run train at the warehouse. The timetable takes into account breaks, shift changes and other relevant restrictions. The generation and monitoring of the schedules was implemented entirely in SAP EWM.

Dynamic routing is a major research topic for logistics service providers and based on satellite navigation systems. The major challenge in operational business practice applications is the dynamic high-performance analysis of GPS data with individual depots and vehicles in logistics - and the acceptance and use by logistics employees in administration and truck driver roles. Therefore this contribution outlines a basic design of a software and process system for these application areas in order to evaluate the first estimates regarding the overall business value of GPS-based dynamic routing in logistics.

The information economy is characterized by an excessive supply of data and information, which makes it difficult to establish an optimal information management. Therefore, this paper deals with the challenge of how an efficient information logistics can be established. An approach using the lean philosophy for identification and categorization of information is presented. The paper concludes with a practical use case example outlining the feasibilty of this approach.

We observe an ongoing increase of complexity of transport and transport-related services in road-based freight carriage as a result of increasing shipper demand. As a consequence, fleet management and fleet dispatching challenges become quite harder. A particular challenge comprises the synchronization of operations related to a complex order, in which the activities of two or more vehicles are coupled by temporal coordination constraints. This article outlines challenges and research questions related to fleet scheduling with comprehensive service requirements. We give an insight into first research results.

The industrial application of Overhead Conveyor Systems to facilitate in-house transportation is widespread. When it comes to these conventional Overhead Conveyor Systems it is usually a matter of rail-systems that are designed to carry heavy loads. According to these characteristics, such systems have a relatively high weight and later adjustment usually goes hand in hand with extensive costs. Yet especially lighter loads could be transported with significantly lower construction costs. The range of applications for ultra-lightweight payloads also enables an ultra-lightweight design of the overall construction, which in turn makes continuous adaption to the requirements of the company feasible, resulting in a high degree of flexibility.

The GridSorter is a decentralized controlled, modular conveyor system for efficient and space-saving sorting of goods. It can be flexibly adapted to changing requirements. In this article, the technical structure of GridSorter and the three main processes of its decentralized control are presented. The advantages and limitations arising from modularity and decentralized control are described and a short conclusion concerning potential application scenarios is drawn.