Process Management

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.