Adaptability

Nowadays, companies are facing a rapidly changing environment. New products have to be integrated into established manufacturing processes at ever shorter intervals. To assure competitiveness the design of changeable production systems gains more and more importance. Therefore, a control loop of changeability has been developed within the research project “change-supporting process architectures”. The control loop empowers companies to identify urgent changeability needs with an evaluation method and helps them to design and use change-supporting process architectures with economical solutions. The presented article focuses on the methodology for the evaluation of changeability.

Companies are constantly exposed to radical change. One approach to addressing these challenges is changeable production systems. Changeable production systems can only be as adaptable as the human being who is working in them. An integrated view of the dimensions of human beings, technology and organization is essential in this context. The Institute of Industrial Management and Factory Systems has wide experience and competences in the field of research of adaptable production. This is supported by the lab area of the IBF, called IBF-Lab, which allows interdisciplinary research. Practical application is demonstrated using an example of a research project.

Against the background of today’s highly competitive and dynamic market environment, the concept of changeability of producing gets increasingly important for producing companies in order to maintain or even enhance their survivability. The necessity for change in a production system is determined by the time-dependent complexity of the production tasks which change dynamically with the system’s environment. Most research in this area focuses on the approach to achieve a better changeability by the production system’s design. This paper puts another viewpoint on changeability: best way to achieve an enhanced and sustainable survivability of a production system can be achieved by an early and focused determination of the right time and amplitude of change.

In turbulent and innovative markets it is important for any production enterprise to have a high level of robustness within a specific range of output quantities vis-à-vis any changes it will be affected by. In fact, it is necessary to provide a planning routine for the adaptability of production systems as early as during the planning stage. In this way it will be able to respond to unforeseeable developments. Due to the demographic development in particular, it is no longer appropriate to consider the staff structure after the configuration of the machinery equipment has been planned. It is much more important to design manufacturing systems to be productive during the whole usage phase of the production system without a change of the permanent staff. The aim is to enhance the planning task in such a way that the production system can be adapted technically and organisationally as well as in a personnel-oriented manner to a changing performance of an ageing workforce.

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.

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) ...

This paper describes a process oriented method for the planning of versatile production as well as logistics systems. The authors demonstrate how the necessary structures, resources and management capacities can be calculated by using a simple six step planning procedure. Due to the numerous potential applications, the holistic approach as well as the relatively basic design it is possible to file planning results sorted. In doing so, factory designers can compare them easily with new challenges emerging. In combination with permanently available simulation models the process oriented planning procedure is a significant step towards permanent planning disposition.

Since the beginning of the 1990s the business environment of manufacturing industries has changed permanently. A majority of production systems have a lean, cost-effective and process-oriented structure. But this is still not enough for being successful in the long-term. The key factor for meeting challenges of a global market is the changeability of production systems. Instead of their recurring re-planning and rescheduling, they should be designed changeable right from the beginning of the planning phase. Time data is an important calculation and planning basis for this. In this paper we present a concept for dynamic time data management in planning and designing changeable production systems.

Changeability is the capability of an organization to establish changes with a lasting effect. The possibility to correctly plan and create changeability of an organization already in the phase of plan-ning is an essential factor to be taken into account when considering changeable logistics systems. For this reason there is a need for conceptual change of established planning methods. In the context of discrete-event simulation, as an established planning method, the modular design of simulation models may be a first step to include changeability into model-based analysis. Against this background, This article discusses possibilities to build modular simulation models and shows how this modular design can be used in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to show how corporate strategy can be aligned with the production system of an enterprise to derive an operations strategy. Consequently, the operations strategy is employed to define prospective needs of agility. The research methodology builds upon action research that is realized in a long-term approach with two joint manufacturing companies. Both can be classified as small and medium sized enterprises (SME). The preliminary findings underline the importance of a holistic view towards agility emphasizing organization and people as major drivers of agility. These drivers are addressed by means of a playful intervention with LEGO-bricks.