Adaptability

Autonomous control strategies for production logistic processes have already demonstrated their effectiveness on the shop-floor level. This article can be understood as a proof of concept: It is exemplarily shown that a pheromone-based autonomous control strategy can lead to better performance than a central control system when applied to a production network regarding production and transport logistic processes in a holistic way.

Change Management and transformability of factories are usually not planned in an integrated way today. While Change Management focuses solely on the change process itself, this process is mostly ignored in the planning process of a transformable factory. The synthesis of these two approaches allows a holistic support of change processes, in order to promote innovations for example, upgrade employee competencies and use the planned technological, spatial and organisational transformability thoroughly.

Organizational change-processes are usually carried out according to objective criteria; self-organizational aspects (as well as emotions and (basic-) needs as order parameter) are not taken into consideration. However, these aspects eventually decide on the success of innovative processes. Therefore, it is of importance to design organizational innovative processes in such a way that they enable and enhance self-organization. A technique designed to identify order parameters and to enhance self-organizational aspects (using adapted and relevant methods drawn from the field of Industrial Engineering) is introduced and discussed.

Production plant managers try to maximize the machine utilization. In this article it is shown that the operative responsible plant managers should minimize the machine utilization to guarantee minimum cost per unit. Only the sales force has the task to maximize the machine utilization. Operations Management has to organize the production efficiently and has to ensure to meet the customer due dates.

Most enterprises have identified the need for flexibility, but the selection of the right degree of flexibility is a complex task. Sophisticated methods, which consider uncertainties in the valuation model, are time consuming and require a supporting software tool. The existing ones are applicable for very specific planning tasks only. In this paper, a methodology to support the valuation of manufacturing flexibility and PLANTCALC™, a supporting software tool, are presented. Both have been developed in a joint research project of the Institute for Machine Tools and Industrial Management and the Siemens AG.

The intensive international competition exerts strong cost pressure on Germany’s producing companies. Hence, managers more and more decide to relocate industrial locations to foreign countries in order to reduce their costs. However, not all possibilities to strengthen and to sustainably save Germany’s industrial locations have been tapped, yet. One step towards this that is supposed by companies to keep a high potential, is to collaborate. A new approach for the design of collaborations focussing complexity drivers shall raise the probability of success of collaborative goods and services.

For the implementation of autonomous control of transport processes it is tried to transfer well known and approved routing protocols from data communication to transport problems. Here structural differences between data and transportation networks prevent a direct transfer of the protocols, so that several different, particularly adapted protocols with different targets must cooperate in transportation networks. In the following a concept for autonomous controlled transport networks, called “Distributed Logistics Routing Protocol”, is introduced, developed at the CRC 637 “Autonomous Control of Logistic Processes” in Bremen.

Mastering high product variance and life cycle dynamics of demand can be an important competitive advantage in assembly. The main lever to this is a smart structuring of capacities and their assignment to assembly resources, such as lines, stations etc. The true benefit of this lever is hardly exploited due to poor support by established design methodologies. The article presents possible approaches to structure capacities in assembly and shows their exemplary use in practice.

This technical contribution presents a digital planning environment for an integrated facility layout and logistics planning. The aim is a noticeable reduction of time and effort for middle- and long-term facility planning and production planning. Therefore current data from the shop floor and order management are provided in an object-oriented consistent digital structure. This data is used to forecast the need for action and to deduct alternative solutions. Planning becomes more effective, long-term planning tasks become day-to-day activities so that the flexibility of the enterprise increases.

Incentives for self control in enterprises can only be successful when integrated by coordination. For this, harmonious concepts and “new” mechanisms of cooperation have to be developed. That topic is discussed in this article.