Process Management

Configuration management is a key task in scope of product development processes of passenger aircraft. Business processes as well as methods and IT tools of virtual product development are facing top-level demands in this industry. This paper provides background information with respect to configuration management in aerospace industry. Furthermore, it discusses challenges resulting hereof for aircraft manufacturers.

In product creation, time reduction and increasing of innovation ability will be enabled by new innovations of methods and technologies for virtual engineering. The idea of virtual engineering is a holistic approach of a collaborative, virtual and integrated product creation. Therefore, individual, application-oriented configuration and an interoperable integrated IT-environment are required. Moreover, virtual engineering deals with adoption and optimisation of methods and tools for management of environments for product creation.

Although medium sized enterprises ascribe high importance to knowledge management and its impact on company’s success, they have rarely undertaken steps to introduce respective methods. Only a small share of companies applies selected methods, usually rather sporadic and without connection to corporate strategy or other management techniques. The reason lies in the lack of a tool for choosing the most suitable methods. Out of the multitude of instruments available for knowledge management, it is difficult to decide about a method mix fitting best to respective business processes, initial situation and specific demands of the company. This paper presents a concept to manage these shortcomings.

To reduce main operating time during machining processes it is necessary to increase the relevant process parameters. For single lip drilling these parameters are feed rate and cutting velocity. In the case of an increase of the process parameters it comes to an unwanted effect, the so-called chattering, which affects both the quality of the bore holes and the tool life in a negative way. The goal is to avoid these oscillations by implementing an adaptronical tool holder.

In modern industry optical technologies stand for a leading innovative power influencing all sectors of economy and, thus, representing important factors within economic competition of coming markets. Regarding the manufacture of complex consumer optics the development of reasonable and flexible mass production processes is one of the dominant priority actions and ultra-precision machining technologies play a key role within this challenging task.

New concepts in the field of solid state lasers with output powers up to several kW, which are close to the introduction to industry, in combination with fast or modular handling units, open up a wide range of new applications within the field of laser material processing. Beside production-technological aspects, such as high output power and good beam quality, the new laser concepts offer economical advantages compared to conventional solid state lasers due to their high energy efficiency of more than 20 %.

Increasing competition in product costs leads worldwide to the need of process improvement - especially in small and medium-sized enterprises. Projects of production and logistics, with the aim of optimising process organisation and manufacturing control are assumed to have the knowledge of decisive system parameters and adequate possibilities in interference. Against this background the efficient use of the resource information is very important in future. Precisely because the use of RFID in production control has even more rationalisation potentials, when the process monitoring of production process must be fast, safe and efficient real time close controlled.

Collaborative Business in the common sense addresses the tightly coupled, cooperative interworking between different companies on the business process layer. The capability of full-fledged, realtime collaboration is one of the fundaments for the virtual enterprise. Based upon a cooperation with the SAP AG a methodological framework for the collaborative, automated generation of business processes is being developed in the CoBPIA-project. The major goal can be described as the best possible adaption towards rapidly changing market situations, achieved by the processing of a market request and its automated transformation into a business process. The given approached is highly knowledge driven.

In many cases producers of investment goods offer their customers product-related services to enhance the problem solving possibilities of the product. As these service offers are gaining importance for industry, an ever-increasing necessity to optimise service processes, as has been done for production processes in the past, emerges. Experiences so far clearly show that many industrial companies have not yet realised this necessity. Service processes are often provided in a rather unorganised way. Against this background this paper presents a tool to assist industrial efforts to analyse and optimise service processes.

The process design and management in inter-organisational co-operations, like production networks for example, is rising steadily in importance. These complex socio-technical systems require a holistic approach in terms of an abstract descriptive model. A convenient modelling paradigm is being introduced in the discussion below with the Views Concept which orients on projections. Following from the purpose, the construction and content of the individual views are explained. A deeper analysis of the Views Concept is provided with the planning of a production system.