Profitability

The start-up of production and logistics equipment in a production system is embedded in a superior start-up management. This has to manage the different types of ramp-ups in a value-added network efficiently regarding to products, processes and equipment. Planning uncertainties and multifaceted faults increase the equipment manufacturer’s cost and effort substantially, often lead to delays, partially to delayed start-ups, and tie the system manufacturer longer than planned on the ground. Due to these reasons, a holistic and integrated start-up management is required. Thus, the start-up process accelerates and the competitiveness of all involved companies improves significantly.

China plays as a production site as well as supply market and as market for final products for European and American companies an increasing role. The attractiveness for logistics service providers is caused by the gigantic market potential and an enormous market increase. The rise of outsourcing activities of shippers is of special relevance for logistics service providers. Enterprises in the logistics sector are confronted with considerable challenges like quantity and quality of the logistics infrastructure or Guanxi.

The increasing significance of outsourced business processes was the reason for the Fraunhofer Institute of Production Technology IPT and the P3 engineering company for management and organisation to create a study about outsourcing of engineering services. Both associate partners asked decision makers and executives of German companies and medium-sized enterprises, coming from the sectors of automobile-, mechanical and electrical engineering and the aerospace industry. The study identifies chances and risks of outsourcing.

In IT-Offshoring projects there are economic risks (variances of costs), time related risks (loss of know-how) and technical risks (lack of skills and problems with the quality). These risks are analysed on the ground of five case studies. To minimise these risks, the author designed strategies that are embedded into a controlling concept.

Logistics service providers intend to provide their costumers with efficient logistics processes and low-cost services. Besides the classical aspects of the controlling of the material and information flow in the supply chain, logistics service providers have begun in the last years to offer additional value added services to their costumers. The value-orientation of industrial and trading companies has put the demand on logistics service providers to provide logistics solutions for a financial optimisation of the supply chain. This contribution will show a solution in form of the “Supply Chain Finance Cooperation”.

Today high levels of inventory and an unsatisfying delivery service are characteristics of the situation in many companies. In several projects with industrial partners the Research Institute for Operations Management Aachen (FIR) investigated the effects of optimizing logistical planning processes on logistics performance. In this context, the analysis of inventory potentials was identified as an important requirement for increasing effectiveness in logistics. The quantitative assessment of a company’s inventory management is the first step for a strategic reorganization of logistic planning processes.

Load carriers as an essential part of the whole supply chain concern suppliers, manufacturers and retailers. In spite of the management of load carriers is still an unattended area within companies, although a holistic regulation and monitoring can gain access to substantial quantitative and qualitative capabilities. The article describes the term of a holistic management of load carriers und presents a framework and levers for an increased capability and a more efficient handling of load carriers.

A new business model, conceived by WZL of the University of Aachen, bases on Open Source development and advances Outsourcing. Commercial Open Source Development (COSD) has the capability to break open the area of conflict between customer orientation, individualisation, product design costs and error probability by embedding the customer systematically and lucratively into product development. Two trends of product design support COSD: Functions of technical products can be increasingly affected through Software solutions; Open Source principals have reached a high level of maturity.

Efficiency analyses are carried out to support a lot of different kinds of decisions. Often, the application of efficiency analysis techniques in the industrial context and outside of the controlling departments is problematic due to resource restrictions. Because a lot of efficiency analysis techniques are mathematically demanding and thus require a lot of working hours and the use of specific software. What distinguishes the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) from other techniques is that it is mathematically less elaborated and can be applied with a spreadsheet computer program. In the paper at hand, TOPSIS is illustrated by the example of an efficiency analysis of heat treatment furnaces.

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 ...