Product Development

After the crisis being classified as completely weathered, Germany is apparently in a flourishing economy. This makes future investments interesting, however, political uncertainty and its economic impact invoke fears of another recession. Many companies have already noticed that research and development provides a lot of investment potential. Thus, the challenge is not to identify required changes of business management, but to analyse and evaluate them in compliance with economic aspects. This is the only way to assure long-term protection of contracts and business success through maintenance and sustainable improvement of research and development. This article presents an approach to adequate optimization of research and development, which can be especially applied situations with scarce human resources.

Correct pricing becomes increasingly a key competitive factor for the tool and mould manufacturing industries. However, pricing is characterized by an inconsistent and subjective supply calculation, especially in the customized production area. In addition, dynamic costs, which have a decisive influence on pricing, are not regarded with adequate attention. This paper presents an approach that allows for a statement on the offered price related to time dynamic costs. Furthermore, the approach permits propositions concerning the probability with which an estimated price occurs based on the enterprise related aggregation of knowledge.

The growing importance of knowledge in product development processes is followed by the urgent need to manage the quality of implemented knowledge management strategies in the process. All sorts of companies have been implementing knowledge management activities in their daily routines, either or not they are aware of it. This paper introduces a model to measure the maturity level of knowledge intensive business processes, which is adjusted to the needs of small and medium enterprises (SME). A set of success factors and their indicators were developed to help identifying the as-is process situation and plan improvement measures as well as a web-based self-assessment tool.

The low degree of efficiency of compressed air makes it very expensive. This conclusion is based on the energy input. According to today’s level of knowledge, compressed air systems operate much more efficiently than several years ago. The range of measures in order to increase efficiency grows resistant but the overall efficiency of compressed air systems is still disappointing. One solution and topic of this paper is the avoidance of compressed air in the industrial production wherever possible.

The rise of the complexity of products and the product development process in addition to shorter development cycles and the customers’ high demands on quality, increase the pressure on producing as accurately and economically as possible. Hence, it is necessary to avoid errors in the early phases of development instead of fixing them at a later stage, which can be costly. This article uses the product configuration of milling robot units to show an innovative solution for the early development phase. This approach uses established technologies from the area of semantic technologies and problem solving methods. It also shows how to improve the reliability of product configuration by making use of the expertise from later phases in the development.

Many companies today consider managing and optimizing their product lifecycle information as a key competitive factor. This requires the integration of different domains along the Product Lifecycle in an integrated information model. Today, many Domain integrating IT-Projects, which aim to introduce PLM-Solutions, are managed as there would be classical domain specific IT Products introduced. For the conceptual solution design customers use to consult typical business strategy consultants. For implementation they consult IT-System Supplier Services. The complex domain integrating part is often rationalized away by phrases like loose coupling or service-oriented architecture. In such kind of approach a gap exists which has serious consequences in actual IT-projects. Integration independent of concepts like SOA means that system elements from one Data-Models have to be integrated and persistently linked in Data-Models of other domains. These facts increase the requirements for ...

Value-stream design is an analysis tool successfully used in industrial production. In addition to it, IAP GmbH has developed another tool, the so-called information-stream design which permits a detailed consideration of the planning processes. Here, particularly the temporal dependencies of processes and information streams are in the focus. By means of information-stream design, IAP has developed a product development process as a standard for SMEs which is described in this article.

In their role as a supplier small and medium sized Enterprises are often in dependence of large-scale enterprises. Rising international competition increases that pressure on SMEs. To react fast and flexible to customer wishes but also keeping high quality standards by saving costs, is enormously important for such enterprises. Especially at single or small-scale production the automated production planning is a big challenge. This article shows a possible solution to that problem in form of an automated and integrated production planning. In particular the article illustrates the generation of process alternatives within the solution by using Ant Colony Optimization.

Today the appropriate handling of complexity is a vital competitive factor for manufacturing firms. An effective complexity management must not only focus on the optimisation of the product architecture but has also to consider the interdependences between the product architecture, the development organisation and the development process. The coherent design of these three domains in the context of complexity management is the topic of this article.

Although all approaches to proactive change management of production systems emphasize the relevance of complexity, an integrated building block “management of complexity” is not available. Based on a specification of the domains and dimensions of production complexity a framework for handling complexity is outlined. It covers guidelines, principles and tools for coping with the multiplicity, diversity, ambiguity and dynamics of production systems.