Product Development

To cope with the hard global competition in shipbuilding and to secure a high volume of orders for German shipyards there is a need for strengthening research and development in shipyards. An economic development of ships needs a quick and distinct identification of product data as well as a high efficiency of the processes which are linked with these data. To achieve these demands an integration of a product data model and of a process model is necessary witch is described in this paper.

The processes for the procurement of individual components are coined by a high grade of complexity. The reason is that an individual component often cannot be identified by a unique item number. In point of fact an additional detailed description for each individual part is necessary. As a rule the needed descriptions cannot be created in an ERP system directly which causes an additional effort concerning the distribution of the individualization information to all suppliers that are involved in the manufacturing process. The following article shows how the distribution can be configured in an effective and transparent way within a supplier network.

Today, mechanical and plant engineering companies are already providing service bundles in the form of product-service combinations. These consist of common ranges of services, e.g. for development, customisation, operator, financing or maintenance. As a rule however, the elements of service bundles are developed separately. Moreover, the services offered are often viewed as a necessity demanded by the market. A strategy appearing to promise long-term success is pursued by offering solutions in the form of hybrid products in which service and material good form a symbiotic relationship. Rigorously pursuing this strategy entails sustainably implementing a business process to develop hybrid products in a company. This paper discusses requirements of organizing this business process. Attention is focused on a networked approach to developing material goods and services as well as the incorporation of a mechanical and plant engineering company’s network of relationships.

Technology driven industries are facing new challenges to manage the spare part business of high-quality products due to decreasing innovation cycles and increasing product complexity. An influencing factor for the total profitability is the after-sales strategy for spare parts after the end-of-production decision of a product. On the one hand the guaranteed service level can be achieved by excess stocks and expensive scrapping actions. On the other hand if out of stock situations may occur, penalties and an eventual image loss have to be taken into account. Both strategies can be combined to reduce costs significantly by using a dynamic life cycle simulation approach.

The increasing complexity in products, structures and processes causes a creeping reduction of the efficiency of intra- and inter-organisational business pro-cesses. Since not all parts of complexity can be influenced by the managerial work, the controlling of the other parts by efficient processes is an important aspect. Business process modularisation allows identifying process parts with clearly defined interfaces, which mainly reduce the complexity of these pro-cesses.

The heterogeneity of teams - in terms of disciplines and functional affiliation within the company - turns out to be both chance and challenge relating to the effectiveness of the team members. The mix of employees with differing educational and professional background allows for coping with highly complex tasks, on the one hand. On the other hand, it often leads to highly varying perspectives and preferences within the team, resulting in disagreements and lower work efficiency. Therefore, on the basis of an extensive research project in the area of rapid prototyping, the Knowledge Integration Training for Teams - KITT has been developed. It offers behavioural strategies for managing typical barriers of knowledge and information exchange in interdisciplinary teams.

The objective of designing layout for a chemical plant is to place all necessary equipments within a steel construction and predefined building sites. The design must consider constraints arising from various areas of expertise. An installation is optimal if as many constraints as possible are satisfied and the costs are minimized. The difficulty in finding an optimal installation lies in the combinatorial complexity of the problem. Moreover the constraints are often expressed in a fuzzy way and may be contradictory. Therefore an optimal installation can often not be achieved. In this article we present two new approaches towards computer aided plant design. The first solution combines a mulitobjective evolutionary algorithm with fuzzy logic. The second solution uses constraint programming.

More than ever individualized products which come up to the exact customer wishes are in great demand. This statement also applies to the automobile market especially to vehicles of the upper class. Because the manufacturer offer a great supply of individual packages nearly every customer wish can be realized. If you look at this development from a company’s disposition point of view you notice that the biggest problem is the management of the variety of variants which partly go almost ad infinitum. In the following an approach should be shown for the reduction or rather the complete avoidance of the complexity through the use of a special product configuration system which is decoupled from the actual product model.

Innovations are especially successful, if customer requirements are already incorporated appropriately in the development stage. The translation of customer requirements to innovation specifications is particularly difficult, if the innovation consist of a system bundle of services and physical products, as it is often recognizable in industry nowadays. This paper shows how Quality Function Deployment (QFD) can be utilized to develop these mixed bundles. Until now QFD is a well-known instrument for the development of purely physical products. By its extension it can lead to an optimised assignment and design of components in a Product Service System (PSS).

The development of the information technology is a pre-condition for a more efficient work in engineering too. In the last few years many tools have been developed which use Argumented Reality. This technology has a great potential in the area of operating and overhaul and of the development of maintenance support systems especially. This publication describes the possibilities of AR and presents a concept of efficient information supply during the maintenance on location. Further are discussed problems of using and development of AR-Systems.