Manufacturing Systems

The demographic change will be one of the big challenges for operational logistics in the upcoming years. With the aging of logistics workers, physical constraints increase especially when employment is characterized by high physical stress (e.g. like in production and logistics). That causes higher demands on the design of logistics workplaces. But how can companies react to this, taking into account that value added orientation leads to new demands to workers? Is there a chance that the increasing percentage of elder employees can properly fulfil the demands in the future? Whereas the ergonomic design of workplaces is the precondition, an intelligent labour organisation with diversified stress can preserve the worker’s ability to work.

Derived from the automotive industry an increasing number of companies - also from other industry sectors - implemented their own Integrated Production System. Relevant aspects concerning the implementation of an Integrated Production System like the motivation, the structure and the implementation strategy, as well as necessary efforts and benefits, were subject of a short survey by the Institute of Production Science (wbk) with chief managers of selected industry partners. This article summarizes the survey results and gives a short outlook to the future trend of Integrated Production Systems.

The bullwhip effect leads to instabilities in supply chains. Research on this phenomenon stresses the normative approach. This means that the causes of the bullwhip effect are identified within the structure and processes of the supply chain. However, the bullwhip effect persists even when the operational causes are under control, or when demand information is stationary and known to all parties. Most of all, the influence of behavioural decision making on the bullwhip effect has been underestimated. This is why the paper strives to shed light on this aspect by resorting to a simulation game, the supply net game, for learning inventory control in production networks. The experimental results, involving 130 participants, show that the decision pattern of counterintuitive decision making produces and reinforces what it is thought to lessen namely the bullwhip effect. This happens whenever the participants restrain from ordering while backlogs are building up or continue to order while ...

The shortening of both time to market und product life cycle in combination with an increase of cost pressure, demand a fast and flexible product development process. The idea of simultaneous engineering is to gain time by treating product, process and resources in parallel and thus discovering discrepancies faster and adjusting the necessary factors. In order to establish an efficient knowledge management a wiki platform, here acting as a social software, is introduced. It serves as a centre of navigation within the process chain and supports the communication between the subprojects. Content can be edited by any member of the research project and may be discussed and changed by others. Its fast and free implementation qualifies the wiki tool and offers a secure and easy to handle platform.

Production Ramp-Ups are crucial for an industrial companies´ success. Business processes have to be controlled throughout the entire Production Network, what could be ensured by the use of modern workflow-based control methods. So far it is still questionable what should be the workflow’s goal. Looking at a ramp-up along the supply chain the process consists of a large number of local ramp-ups. For this a prognosis system will be introduced which allows an educated guess on the development of the number of pieces during the ramp-up. The prognosis is founded on a knowledge-based approach and does rely on multivariate data analysis. This will lead to a ramp-up forecast which could offer strategic aims into workflow-based network control tools.

The growing role of China for manufacturing and as a source of low-price-products, Chinese companies have increasingly affected this strategic setup of manufacturing companies in Europe. Exploiting this China Price Factor leading companies have reorganised their value chains in order to include china made components. Chances and risks of the distributed manufacturing, considering Chinese partnerships, are discussed. The strategic position of Chinese companies as well as the general development in china and other emerging markets allows drawing a number of conclusions and making an attempt for an outlook of what is to be expected as possible consequences of Chinas important role.

In production logistics of the machine and tool manufacturig industry RFID-systems are implemented more and more. Enterprises expect an improvement of efficiency in tracing containers and material provision. Implementation of RFID often fails because the processes should be adopted as they are and limits of the technology are not known sufficiently. This article shows the limits of RFID in tracing containers in production and introduces an approach of implementing RFID-supported processes.

Lean Production-Systems (LPS) are widespread especially among the big automobile producers. LPS are company-specific configured systems which optimally coordinate technical, personal, and organisational methods. The implementation and maintenance (of elements) of an LPS requires a certain effort, but provides also many benefits. The effort-benefit relation especially for small and medium-sized enterprises is often not known. This paper allows in this context an overview of how to make this relation transparent as to production factors and size of enterprise.

Developing and testing and operating complex machinery and repairing it under time pressure if it breaks down - individuals in many professions have to learn new skills. Moreover, they have to do so as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Virtual technologies are supporting learning more and more frequently. Operations and procedures on machinery and plants are already taught in individual lessons on the virtual model. They can be repeated as often as desired without the space or time constraints of real machinery and without endangering either operator or plants through incorrect behaviour and can be practiced before a real machine or plant has been constructed.

The increasing demand of hybrid micro-technical systems resp. products in small to middle size lots, requires on the one hand new concepts from the micro production engineering and the production process planning and on the other hand methods for the development of micro production systems. Taking the postulation „small machines for small components“ into account, Micro Factories consist of highly specialized mini machines, each having a footprint of about 0,09 m² in comparison to 5 m² of conventional systems [1]. Micro Factories are arranged independently for each task to form a complex production system. Viewing the use of mini machines in micro production from the perspective of the production process, a concept for using adaptive, automatic quality control loops is proposed.