Process Management

Nowadays factories have to withhold an ever rising pressure to succeed. Customer demands become more demanding and goods have to be available within shorter lead times and lower prices. Flexibility, reliability and resilience are key factors for companies. Against this background, there is a need in companies for constant analysis of their business processes. This is an addition to a paper that was published in the last issue of this journal. The first part focused on the general possibility of the two methods “Dortmunder Process Chain Model” and production characteristics curves and how they could be used to analyse factories in different detail levels. In this second part the focus is set more on the perspectives that both models base on. On the one hand there is the order flow perspective of the “Dortmunder Process Chain Model” and on the other hand the resource perspective of the production characteristics curves that have to be aligned.

Cash-pooling solutions constitute for certain problems in companies and groups of companies useful tools to optimize or improve specific business aspects. Essential for an efficient and fast implementation is that the situation is well described, an economic calculation is prepared, the tax and legal points are checked and the accounting staff is involved in the change process. Only if these preliminary analyses are successfully concluded, the next steps in the drafting and subsequent implementation into operational business can be followed. The experience of several projects shows that no serious changes are needed in daily business, but certain processes can be optimized to create free capacities for important tasks. In addition to process optimization under certain cash-pooling structures the opportunity to optimize interest result and the ability to entail intra-group financing is provided.

In the fall of 1985, the first issue of CIM Management was published, covering the technical, organizational and social aspects of industrial business processes. This article is about the journal’s changing focus over the course of time and about the question which topics are as important today as they were in 1985.

Nowadays factories have to withhold an ever rising pressure to succeed. Customer demands become more demanding and goods have to be available within shorter lead times and lower prices. Flexibility, reliability and resilience are key factors for companies. Against this background, there is a need in companies for constant analysis of their business processes. The process perspective that was established in the industry since the 1980s will be addressed in the following by using the “Dortmunder Process Chain Model”. A permanent preparedness for change relies on being able to report about the plant’s status quo at all times. Therefore valuation methods and key figures are needed that represented by production characteristics curves in this paper. After an introduction to these two topics, the combination of both to one process based valuation method will be outlined. The intended methodology will represent a holistic decision model for plant controlling. This approach is being ...

GloNet is a research project co-funded by the European Commission which aims in supporting small and medium sizes enterprises to collaborate in the frame of virtual organisations. The cloud-based GloNet platform supports the efficient organisation of business processes involving suppliers and customers in the product lifecycle. The solution will allow for the maintenance of complex, individualised, and extended products. This article presents a use case from the solar ranch, summarises process requirements and elaborates on the architecture and important features of the GloNet platform.

In increasingly competitive markets professional service firms are highly recommended to continuously scrutinize and improve the efficiency of their job execution. Providing content-related high quality services, such as technical or business consulting, the respective sub-processes as well as each single activity have to be coordinated effectively and required information needs to be provided completely and in time. Thereby, requirements of an operation at different sites have to be considered, both at the customer’s and the company’s own premises, concerning various areas and locations. This article is an abstract of the problem, the solution and the project-related findings based on a practical example.

Many companies flinch before introducing an IT-supported machine-data acquisition. On one hand there are high investment costs which rise concern and on the other lengthy IT- projects with involvement of external consultants and high complexity often are wanted to be avoided. But now the start-up company LineMetrics developed, based on Lean Management, a new concept which overcomes all these obstacles - machine data acquisition as a service. In doing so there has always been a clear focus: All application, arising from this idea, starting with downtime analysis up to energy management visualization tools are committed to one principle: SIMPLICITY - A concept, not only SMEs can benefit from. Besides, this idea is not significantly new. Plug& play and the use of webservices is already in most realms of our daily life very common and, over the last few years, has turned into a basis for many other operations.

The development of medical high-tech products is associated with high costs for documentation as well as for risk and quality management. In addition, they are subject to tight regulations and licensing procedures. To meet these challenges, the use of new methods and information technology tools is worthwhile, especially in the medical device industry. The product life cycle management approach, which was developed in other industries, offers med-tech companies the potential of being sustainably innovative in the global competition.

Complex technologies of all industrial ranges require increasingly a holistic view of the entire technological process chains. In many methods processes are illustrated as already established and approved technological processes. The way up to an executable technological process is not supported. Straight in the technologically oriented R&D the know-how which is necessary for reproducible quality-assuring production is developed. In this paper new methods for the technologically oriented modelling and analysis of process chains are described which allow to effectively generate operational technology knowledge.

Process innovations should be planned at least just as systematically as product innovations. The process roadmapping is a methodology for illustrating development of processes and process variants in the future. Rising dynamics and increasing complexity let the availability of different process variants appear necessary. Roadmapping supports the procedure of defining process variants.