Manufacturing Systems

This article points out the basic concept of „One-Piece-Flow” in the context of facility planning in manufacturing and shows examples of its successful application in assembly. The authors present configuration variants of this concept and they show the important design parameters with their effects on the system performance. While in the 80’s the principle of flow production was used only for large scale production and mass production, there is a new understanding today: the flow principle is also usable with advantages for medium quantity production, especially for assembly operations carried out by manual and by automatic work stations as well.

Due to shortening product life cycles, complex supplier networks and an increasing number of parties involved, the decision making process has become both more critical and more difficult. The complexity and dynamics of the ramp-up phase make it necessary to not try to concentrate the decisions in on hand, but rather distribute decisions among decentralized yet competent decision makers on-site. It is, however, necessary to provide the decentralized decision makers with the basis and the capability of decision making, and a joint target system to ensure optimal outcome. The paper presents a heuristic approach to design and operate production ramp-up appropriate to stable and efficient ramp-up processes.

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.

With new markets and decreasing transfer barriers producing companies are facing new possibilities for the optimization of their value chain regarding factor and sourcing cost as well as business opportunities in new markets. Global Footprint Design is therefore a highly relevant business issue which needs to address global cost advantages on one hand and exploitation of markets on the other. The paper presents a heuristics for footprint design which is oriented towards these opportunities.

The article argues that there is the internationalization of products and capital-orientated market financialization exits a stress ratio. The quantifying logic of capital-orientated market forms of control abstracts from qualitative criteria which may destabilize the innovative ability of enterprises. Therefore a more efficient regulation of the capital market is required to stabilize international networks of production.

The paper describes a game called the Supply Net Game, built around the structure of a production supply network based on the “anchoring and adjustment heuristic” which is known as the one people use to make inferences about uncertain events. The game involves four players where everyone manages his manufacturing unit that consists of four production lines which proceed to the joint development of products with the other units. While planning production and controlling inventories, every person should try to minimize the costs caused by both holding items on stock and being in an out-of stock situation. The paper stresses the valuable impact of management games for production engineering education in general and particularly the significance of learning implicit skills as well as gaining insight in inventory control and management of complex distributed production systems such as the system dynamics production network model introduced in the paper.

Recent investigations concerning the international state of the art of micro production technology [1, 2] showed, that it has to be distinguished between two main development directions regarding the manufacturing of function units on the one hand as well as complete products on the other hand. First of all there are the classical precision engineering oriented manufacturing methods [3, 4], e.g. according to the DIN 8580 [5]. Secondly manufacturing methods from the area of microsystems technology have been observed [3, 4]. The integration process of different product functions into one part or component geometry, which is running parallel to the miniaturisation, is a specific challenge regarding the field of micro manufacturing [1]. This affects especially the product and production process development, concerning the precision engineering oriented manufacturing methods. This paper addresses problems regarding the operations management of precision-engineering-oriented micro-production ...

The future of manufacturing industries in Europe is currently a topic for frequent discussions. Competitors from Far East dominate the international markets with low-price products. Outsourcing of manufacturing tasks from Europe to far-east countries is a common practice in the case of commodity products. Will the European economy be able to absorb the resulting losses also in the near future? Experts don’t think so. A study conducted by the Institute for Automation and Control, Vienna University of Technology and the Society for the Promotion and Modernisation of Production Technologies in Austria shows new perspectives with the concept of Adaptive Production

Rising demands for productivity and precision are leading to new machine concepts and processing strategies for tool machines. To meet the new request of these technologies all involved sub-systems must be taken into account for the development, also the clamping jig, which was neglected badly during the past. So one part of the research project “MaschinenbauInitiative Next Economy” was the development of a hydraulic clamping jig for dry milling processes, which can be integrated into compensation concepts of tool machines very easily. As a result, the demonstrator can hand over data of temperatures, positions and forces to the PLC without need of an excessive amount of additional hard and software.

The sector of manufacturing and other involved sectors generates more than 50 % of the German GNP. For future success of this sector a production research, leaded to permanent top performance in production technology, is necessary. Adaptive manufacturing systems are needed for the fast changing future markets. Digital manufacturing is a knowledge based production, which accelerate the technical planning processes and allows collaborative work in networked production structures. The example of an innovation-cluster “digital production” shows the impact of future manufacturing systems realized through time and cost cutting in the developing processes of products and their production.