Production Planning

Customer demand for products and demand for materials to ensure material availability is often forecasted. The results are often used in the operative production planning and control. Exponential smoothing methods are widely used for this forecasting. To ensure high forecasting quality over time, the smoothing parameter has to be adapted over time. An automation is suggested and analyzed.

The day-to-day business of the forging industry is characterized by fluctuating order quantities and production of numerous variants. Within the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 489 “Process chain for the manufacturing of precision forged high performance components” a simulation based approach was developed for the implementation of operative tool management to evaluate new technological and organizational measures for enhancing the tool life of tools used for precision forging.

Lot sizing is a substantial factor of economic production. There are various lot sizing approaches considering the same cost factors in different ways. Their results are usually quite similar. A common weakness of all lot sizing approaches is the limited consideration of relevant cost factors. The costs which are neglected usually rise with increasing lot sizes. This leads to illusory exact results because too large lots are calculated generally. This paper compares functions and results of different lot sizing approaches and discusses neglected cost factors.

The European automotive industry can be characterized by its multi-variant products resulting in complex production planning problems. Often separate systems are used to plan personnel capacity and production programmes. Usually human-resource allocation planning is done very inefficiently and independently from actual capacity requirements. This causes imbalances in the form of idle workers or overloaded workstations. This paper describes an approach for the integration of human resource allocation and production planning into one common planning platform in order to utilise existing optimisation potential. It will further describe the impact of the solution on flexibility and mutability of assembly lines.

In an increasingly turbulent environment, today enterprises are confronted with the challenge of aligning available capacities with the capacities required using targeted measures. An approach is presented to support the selection of measures quantitatively.

The assembly and usage of offshore wind energy plants will increase during the next years. The German government updated the Renewable Energies Act in 2009 which pushes the offshore development ahead. One German offshore wind energy park has been assembled and put into operation so far. Transport, construction and assembly underlie strong influences like weather conditions on sea as well as material availability. The presented article shows these influences and a concept in which adaptive planning and control strategies are used to keep the overall process under control.

The regional and economical policies of the Chinese government in the past few decades have led to marked regional economic imbalances. In order to implement initiative in China successfully, a valid location planning is a great challenge for foreign logistics companies. They need different qualitative and quantitative criteria for location decision. In this article was showed an overview of the major logistics hubs in China and analyzed their characteristics and location quality from the perspective of the western logistics companies.

Fabrication and assembly processes - in which the manual work processes play an important role related to a high probability of errors and interruptions - can be planned with the production simulation, if the simulation approach is adapted to the robust planning method. This article shows for the example of shipbuilding, how the simulation user benefits from the scenario-based process model for the preparation and management of the simulation scenarios. Additionally a systematic evaluation method simplifies the interpretation of the simulation results in order to assess the robustness of the planning alternatives.

The future of the German manufacturing sector and its seminal industry sectors is a matter of the corporate research project between McKinsey & Company and the Department for production management, technology and machine tools (PTW) at the TU Darmstadt. An innovative approach on segmenting different types of production within the manufacturing sector offers a differentiated view on the German production structure. A comparison with other European industrial nations offers the classification of the German manufacturing sector within an international context. Based on a status-quo scenario and with corresponding improvement methods for the production it is possible to set up a future scenario for strengthening the production in Germany.

Today, the logistics performance especially of manufacturing companies is becoming a distinctive success factor in the marketplace. Perceiving this development Siemens’ Electronics Manufacturing plant in Amberg (EWA) implemented a comprehensive logistics KPI system supporting the controlling of production processes. The tools used, however, fall short of considering the interdependencies between different logistics KPIs. The article reports on a project conducted in cooperation between EWA and the Institute for Production Systems and Logistics of Leibniz University at Hannover. Presenting the project’s approach, conclusions and resulting experiences, the theoretical background as well as the fundamental impact production operating curves can offer for the competitiveness of a manufacturing company are outlined.