Profitability

In the past ecological (and social) aspects were often dealt with by the legal or compliance department. Ever more often ecological issues are linked with eco-innovations. This almost paradigmatic change of perspective entails that ecological topics are not just seen as cost drivers but as a management area relevant to increase competitiveness and to create business cases for sustainability. Although this view is increasingly adopted it remains fuzzy what really constitutes processes of sustainability innovations. Large companies often have R&D and sustainability departments driving eco-innovations in a professional manner. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), however, depend on other means such as public-private partnerships (PPPs) which can play an important role for the diffusion of eco-innovations in SMEs.

The increasing turbulence in enterprises environment becomes apparent by rising variant diversity and continuously reducing product life cycles. These results cause immense and not resolvable adaption necessities for producing companies. The approach of network factories combines system immanent and network bounded potentials to increase adaption alternatives, reduce adaption risks, and optimize agility.

Increased productivity is a fundamental paradigm of successful business. No wonder management efforts are focused primarily on this “golden calf” of the market economy. There are enough scientific publications dealing with this topic to fill libraries. Never before have we seen so many students educated in the field of Economics at university level. Despite knowing a great deal about tools, methods and procedures, at the place where value is created we continue to think about the same questions and the same productivity deficits: Why is it that companies continue to lose the ability to maintain lean, productive processes in spite of having access to all instruments in the field of Economics? Why do many companies permit the growth of unproductive performance even though they have just introduced controlling instruments to prevent this from happening? Why is it so difficult to achieve significant, sustainable productivity growth even though companies often have access to a broad ...

In the field of micro manufacturing, a highly precise adjustment of relevant process parameters is of major importance. The continuing miniaturization of work pieces and machines leads to very small tolerances. The occurrence of so called size-effects interferes with a direct application of knowledge and experiences from macro manufacturing. Moreover, the high specialization of manufacturing technologies and processes in micro manufacturing requires a careful review of each process’s suitability with respect to the involved materials and components. This article presents a method that supports process designers with structured procedures and notations, to model and evaluate technological as well as logistic dependencies along the process chain. Thereby, it supports the selection and configuration of suitable processes for a given process chain.

The design of the supply concept re-presents a decisive competitive factor for companies, since this significantly affects the throughput time and inventory levels. This paper explains how environmental issues can be quantified in addition to the conventional types of costs and presents a method for the selection and design of a supply concept.

The economic analysis of physical assets over the entire life cycle is essential in modern industry. Particularly, in investment decisions, not only the pure expenditure for the procurement is used. Life cycle costing considers the required investments of a production site’s life cycle as a whole. In order to reduce the life cycle costs it is necessary to identify, analyze and derive corresponding measures. In practice, the data tracking over several periods is challenging. The following paper shows how the new IT approach of cyber-physical systems can improve such data collection. Furthermore, it will be shown how this database supports future investment decisions as well as the selection of life cycle support services.

Nowadays, companies deal with a hugh amount of challenges which are the reason to change the production system more and more often. To be able to do this a production system needs a sufficient degree of changeability. Caused on a change, a communication process between the user and supplier will be initialized. In an optimal communication process there will be no losses due to communication lacks. This article deals with a change-specific taxonomy which adds some items to a communication process to decrease losses during communication.

This article addresses the question whether a purely monetary-oriented user will decide to buy an entirely electrically powered vehicle today. For a vehicle that is available with petrol, diesel and electric drive, a life cycle cost analysis is performed. For this purpose, all cash inflows and outflows over the entire life cycle are covered, placed in a framework and finally the present value is determined to evaluate the alternatives. Making reasonable estimates special input parameters are varied in order to determine the resulting cost implications.

Companies implement numerous measures to reduce the use of materials and energy in order to increase the resource efficiency. Resource efficiency has to be assessed over the whole lifecycle of a product. Therefore, an approach is requested which assesses the impacts of measures on the production and the use phase of a product.

A sustainable constitution of our way of living is more and more subject to the discussion in society and politics. The transportation sector, causing a considerable percentage of the worldwide CO2 emissions, resides right in the middle of the debate. As a result companies find themselves in an area of conflict between economical and ecological objectives, which cannot always be reconciled. Approaches to solve this dilemma are discussed under the general term „Green Logistics“. The implementation of an intelligent cargo system can contribute to bring these approaches to practice.