Branche: Automotive

In hardly any other sector have the production conditions changed so rapidly in recent years as they have in the automotive industry: An increasing variety of models, greater variety, greater segmentation and the increasingly international nature of automobile production require efficient supplier plants with greater production depth. Suppliers who want to compete therefore have to continuously and flexibly adapt their processes to the dynamics of the major manufacturers. At the forefront of this is the company IT: From this it is expected that more and more formerly analogous processes will be reproduced digitally. But digitization is only possible with great knowledge of the industry and individually tailored solutions.

Automotive manufacturers and their suppliers need a high degree of process flexibility to respond quickly and efficiently to the market demand. Picture, however, production, purchasing and supply processes not interacting optimally, causing delays which inevitably pushes costs higher. The search for weak points in the supply chain is a major challenge, because common analysis tools cannot holistically capture the already complex processes. The new process mining technology, however, allows for the analysis and visualization of the entire process chain, a task which classic analysis tools fail to accomplish.

Over the past years the use of simulation methods for designing production systems in the automotive industry has been enforced. To identify trends and needs for action, an online survey was sent to 181 simulation experts and users in the environment of the VDA workgroup Ablaufsimulation. This paper illustrates the results of the survey and points out development steps that are necessary for simulation in general and for the VDA Toolkit in particular.

In the automotive industry increasing requirements for quality and an awareness of ever rising costs create significant demands for innovation in both developing and manufacturing. These requirements regarding the final product have to be met by using optimal materials during the development and by using appropriate tooling and machining technologies during the manufacturing process. In producing engines a wide spectrum of materials is used, which in turn are worked upon by a variety of manufacturing technologies. With respect to materials’ technology there is a trend towards developing application specific high performance materials with improved mechanical and/or thermal properties. Production technology then develops innovative and safe manufacturing processes and strategies to be able to apply the new materials.