Process Management

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.

Business processes play an important role for companies these days. No Manager can ignore potentials resulting of the optimisation of these processes. Therefore it is usual to use software tools to collect, visualise and analyse the business structures. The present investigation enabled an overview at actual purchasable systems.

The complexity of today’s products and the resulting complexity of business and manufacturing processes are already very high. Product complexity will increase because of the growing number of engine and car body variants. The possibilities to choose and to combine extra options will increase as well. In order to identify potentials for optimisation and to evaluate new concepts of cooperation and collaboration in multi-tier intra- and inter-company supply chains, these processes have to be modeled and described according to requirements of the automotive industry. The Supply Chain Operations Reference-Model (SCOR-Model) is an instrument to develop a simple and flexible methodology to model structures of supply chains and to scale realistic logistics processes.

With emphasis simulation experts in research, consultancy and industry work on the vision of the Digital Factory. This catch phrase, which is especially promoted in the automotive sector, stands for a comprehensive, simulation model of real production systems and their logis-tics. One of the challenges faced by the developers in the realisation of this vision is the integration of big models. The article describes a concept, which supports the horizontal and vertical integration of simulation models.

With Standardised Processes on the Right Track to Customised Factories The approaches of factory planning that have been developed many years ago have to be adjusted to today’s challenges. Therefore the basic systematics of the Supply Chain Operations Reference- Model (SCOR-Model) are consulted and transferred to the processes of factory planning. The aim is to accelerate the planning process and to generate planning results in a higher quality while decreasing the planning effort. This will be achieved by use of a consistent process orientation which bases on standardised processes, field-tested methods, models and tools and on best-practice examples. This article explains the system and contents of the Process Model of Factory Planning and will give an impression of the first software-based prototype.

Nowadays simulation is a technically mature tool for industrial process design. However, its potential has not been put to use adequately so far. One reason for that is the highly dynamic development of products in this field, which makes it difficult to keep track with the range of products, their possibilities and limitations as well as the state of the art in general.

In the internet age, collaborative product development has led to new challenges for OEM’s, suppliers and development partners. In the course of globalisation, engineering activities come together and companies are forced to follow innovative concepts concerning product development processes. This paper presents a framework to support dynamic product development processes for cross-cultural, global value constellations by providing semantic information model standards and suitable software components. The software framework serves as an open development- and integration platform for both information models and functions which cover the relevant aspects of cross-cultural engineering collaboration.

Latest developments within the production engineering area carry out a more higher complexity of products combined with an increasing need of customer integrated services. Due to the hereby resulting high investments of time and money it is necessary to develop a methodological approach of the service engineering process as well as the collaboration within the partnering networks. Single enterprises use already different types of Internet enabled collaborative technologies but an enterprise widespreading collaborative development and use of services is not occuring in a sufficient way so far. The paper de-scribes a problem-adequate design of a collaborative technical service within a production network between customers, manufacturers and suppliers. The paper’s result is to demonstrate collaboration service facilities in order to increase the effectivity and efficiency of service processes.

Small and medium enterprises (SME) in the automotive supplier industry are facing rising demands concerning cost and quality of the parts or assemblies they are manufacturing for their cus-tomers. Additionally, the “time-to-market” has to be reduced. Applying traditional methods for rationalization is not sufficient to cope with these requirements. Furthermore, flexible, open, and efficient business processes and technologies are required in the early stages of the product life cycle. In this contribution, the potential of solution approaches based on collaborative, virtual product and process design and optimization is introduced. An example of a metal forming process in automotive supplier industry is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

Productivity, quality, flexibility and manufacturing costs are not the only criteria for an effective manufacture. To keep competitiveness, a global optimum of the process chain for the manufacturing of an individual product has to be achieved, considering the existing manufacturing capabilities and innovative technologies. In this paper approaches for integrated technology planning are discussed, which are developed at the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) in Aachen.