Adaptability

Complexity of industrial enterprises increases. Responsible for this trend are external drivers like the individualisation of products, the fierce global competition and the speed of technological developments which lead to reduced product life and innovation cycles. Companies react to external complexity by building internal complexity, logistics as a cross functional unit is especially affected. For example, a great number of different customers demand a heterogenic product program which results in operating an increasing quantity of variants. Because of the growing internal complexity a lot of promising logistical solutions are not realised. This article shows an approach how to create an organisational framework - based on the formal principle “Modularisation” - which allows logistics to regain adaptability and mutability by reducing internal complexity.

This paper focuses on the application of a bee-like autonomous control method to a matrix-like shop floor model with setup times.Apparently present planning and control systems are unable to cope with the new needs for flexiblity and process reliability resulting from dynamics and complexity in the environment. Autonomous control means de-centralized coordination of intelligent logistic objects in a dynamically changing environment. By the aid of a continuous flow simulation the system’s performance will be analyzed in regard to the application effect on throughput times and inventory levels.

As a reaction to the growing demands of the market on enterprises, ever more complex procedures for production control are being developed. Most recently, self-organising procedures, which often mimic the behaviour of natu­ral systems (e.g. evolutionary or genetic algorithms), have come to the fore. The methods of Swarm Intelligence and, in particular, the Ant Colony Optimi­zation (ACO), which are characterised by their flexibility and adaptability, could serve as a basis for this. The ifab-Institute has developed a pro­cedure for the short-term, operative manufacturing control based on this approach, which will be presented in this article.

Autonomously controlled transportation processes require decision making of logistic objects regarding routing alternatives. In this contribution a multicriterial evaluation assessment procedure is introduced basing on the fuzzy hierarchical aggregation, adapted and further developed at the CRC 637 “Autonomous Control of Logistic Processes” at Bremen University. The main design focus was user-friendliness within autonomous control and other fields of application. The example of use is a hierarchical structure of the subcriteria characterising the routing alternatives of an autonomous package. It is shown that the procedure can consider unprecise and fuzzy formulated knowledge directly in the model, while parameter adjusting was reduced to a minimum. Different weightings and compensation effects of subcriteria are depicted. The contribution shows the evaluation on a two-subcriteria basis and the possibilities of multicriterial evaluation as well. The evaluation of hard and soft ...

For simple industrial identification in many cases the traditional barcode systems are more profitable than applying RFID technology. But functional advantages in decentral data handling open up cutting-edge application potential. Improvements in component interoperability enable the implementation of robust and adaptable PPC concepts.

Manufacturing flexibility is currently one of the key trends within the automotive industry. In this context, the determination of the optimal degree of flexibility represents a complex decision problem. First of all this article clarifies chances and modes of operation of flexibility in the automotive production. Manufacturing flexibility can be used both to counter short- and medium-term market fluctuations and as a strategic approach to realize long-term costs advantages. Subsequently different aspects which have to be considered within the strategic planning are commented on in detail. The contribution clarifies that the planning of optimal flexibility requires an integrated planning approach.

Changes within organisations and processes define the current processing landscapes of industrial companies. A permanent orientation to competitiveness, the aspiration to effectivity and efficiency as well as the continuous progress in technologies and systems, necessitates an overall coordination of relevant processes. Quite obviously this means today no longer to focus only on production and assembly processes. Only the exact interaction of involved areas - besides production/assembly even areas as logistics, quality and process planning - make a production economically ideal. A leading aircraft-producer realizes significant production-changes by modifying the static (dock-)manufacturing system into a trend-setting flow line-concept.

As the core of the added value the production meets new challenges. Against the background of new trends and changing market mechanism an adjustment of existing production structures is crucial. New sources for earning money can be found in the combination of different leverages which result finally in increasing the economic value added. The objective is to find a combination of above-average performance and cost leadership and to realize these in an integrated production concept. In these redesigned production systems above-average performance is based on the overall connection between methods, people and technologies over the whole supply chain.

The international competition pressure and the increased customer requirements regarding delivery time and individual expression of the products provide the basic conditions for the capital goods industry in Germany. Besides a high productivity the change ability is a prerequisite within the production to also be able to consist in wage-intensive fields competitively at the market. In this article its use is described by flexible production modules with a practice example in the capital goods industry.

In the last years of general economic depression, European small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) have compensated for the large enterprises’ loss in value and job creation. A trend towards a “pulverization” of the economic system from large to small companies could be noticed. On the other hand, growth is an economic prerequisite for sustainable business success. Must a SME therefore grow and become a large enterprise in order to succeed? Not necessarily. Business growth is not a perpetuum mobile; it is restricted by internal diseconomies of scale and scope caused by the increased complexity of large organizations. In this paper, a new approach is presented which shows how small and medium sized companies can realize sustainable growth without losing the advantages of a small organizational structure.