Product Development

Due to the concentration of core competences and the utilisation of international location advantages successful German production companies face a situation with globally dispersed sites in global value added networks. The ongoing globalisation, which includes the integration of external sites, suppliers and partners, leads to complex interactions within networks. However, these interactions are not or are simply partially known and not predictable so far. Being able to control dramatic dynamics in the behaviour of global value added networks, German production companies will be positively affected by globalisation in the future. Therefore, changeable global value added networks which can be quickly adjusted to dynamics become crucial. The paper on hand describes an approach for the planning and optimization of adaptable global value added networks. Background is the approach of the research project “planning and optimization of changeable global value added networks” (POWer.net) ...

Wind energy becomes increasingly important, but the rapid evolution of wind turbines is at the expense of reliability. Insurance statistics revealed that the gear boxes often are the cause for malfunctions. Repairing is expensive and time consuming, as the delivery time for replacement gears and bearings can take up to 18 months. Thus, alternative solutions are requested, especially from the operating companies. Regarding gears, a manufacturing process would be interesting, which is independent from special and gear-individual tools like hobs. 5-axes-milling is considered to be a feasible approach for machining before heat treatment, as a variety of gears could be flexibly reproduced.

The success rate of new products or services can be increased only by a consequent orientation at the customer value: the customer needs drive the buying decision! Existing methods for customer need determination are not suitable for the development of novel products or services: after all, we have to find out customers preferences about something that does not exist yet. In this paper a methodology is presented which helps to identify systematically the customer needs and the relative customer requirements and how to define on their basis the functional requirements for product development. A practical example helps to illustrate the successful application of the approach.

Challenging managerial decisions are more frequent under unpredictable environmental conditions. After clarification of the term “difficulty” in a decision-making, most important psychological misinterpretations and false evaluations are explained and the phenomenon of risk diffusion and cognitive control are discussed.

Nanotechnology offers great potentials for improved product properties and innovative functionalities which have to be considered in the product development in an early stage and compared with product requirements. In practice, a gap is to be recognised between nanotechnology and product development. An approach to close the gap and to improve the interoperability is to define a common language based on a functional-based view. The formalisation and mapping of the functions uses semantic nets and ontologies in order to allow a dynamic expanding and machine readability. Thus, applications and nanotechnology will be linked with the objective of generation new product ideas by nanotechnology.

This paper describes an approach for knowledge based product configuration through the integration of experience and knowledge from the product use phase. The goal of this approach is to enable a faster and software-controlled harmonization of the different customer’s and the manufacturer’s point of view during the pre contract phase. Therefore a case-based reasoning method was developed to be integrated in a rule based product configuration system.

To compete in the global environment companies in high wage countries have to separate themselves from competitors from low wage countries by offering customer specific products and services. Due to the rising complexity of these products the steering of the corresponding production systems is getting more and more resource consuming. One way to handle this aspect is developed within the Excellence Cluster “Integrative production technology for High-wage countries” at RWTH Aachen University. Objective is the set up of production systems that are able to produce customer specific products at mass production costs.

The offshoring of engineering services requires sourcing structures that align with the strategic objectives of the company as well as with the prevailing structural and cultural conditions. The study of a global automobile company active in India provides support for the selection process of an appropriate structure. While no structure is best suited universally, captive centers are becoming increasingly popular.

The information and communication technology distinguish the modern mechanical and automotive engineering. This is described by the term mechatronics. The development progress of information and communication technologies open up further fascinating perspectives: mechatronic systems with inherent partial intelligence. The term Self-optimization characterizes this perspective. Self-optimizing systems are able to react on changing environmental conditions and to optimize their behaviour autonomously. This contribution presents the paradigm of Self-optimization. The potential of Self-optimization is explained by two examples from the system RailCab.

Light emitting diodes (LED) and organic LED (OLED) are characterized by compactness, long lifetime, high luminous density, and good energy efficiency. This development also revolutionizes display technology. By using LED as light source for today’s liquid crystal displays (LCD), more compact display systems with greatly improved energy efficiency and colour rendering become feasible. The next big step will be the replacement of LCD by OLED matrix displays. These developments lead to completely new design possibilities for lighting and display systems. For the knowledge workplace, this means moving beyond today’s screen-centric workplace.