Strategy

Process innovations should be planned at least just as systematically as product innovations. The process roadmapping is a methodology for illustrating development of processes and process variants in the future. Rising dynamics and increasing complexity let the availability of different process variants appear necessary. Roadmapping supports the procedure of defining process variants.

The evidence of the ecological sustainability of logistics systems is increasingly expected by customers inside and outside the supply chain. Companies can affect their carbon footprint at different strategic levels: products, structures, processes and technologies. The potential use and evaluation of technologies and their contribution to improve ecological sustainability while taking into account economic conditions are the subject of this paper.

The development of new products is necessary in order to ensure a company´s survival. But, if badly planned, this also could lead to a corporate crisis. An early customer and competition orientation results in need-based and competitive products and is therefore considered as an essential requirement for innovation success. However, due to a lack of know how concerning the application of appropriate instruments, especially small and medium sized enterprises face big challenges. In this report, the development of a method kit is introduced, which supports a customer and competition oriented product development process during the early innovation phase by providing a suitable and applicable collection of methods in order to implement the development process in practice.

Product innovation and development are key capabilities especially for manufacturing industries. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) as a management concept provides processes and methodologies to establish these capabilities based on the dimensions: Organization, processes and technology. This article discusses the development of the PLM concept from an IT system purely supporting the operational level within a company - moving to a concept supporting top-management decisions regarding product strategy and portfolio. Moreover, a framework is introduced to determine an R&D and PLM Strategy based on the Corporate Business Strategy.

Global trade of finished goods as well as global sourcing of components and raw material is increasing. As a consequence, multinational corporations need to be aware of the benefits and drawbacks of global procurement and production when designing their supply chain. Thereby, custom duties can be an important driver. In this context free trade agreements and their value-content requirements are gaining importance. In this article the mechanisms of free trade agreements and the opportunities and risks for supply chain management are presented. In addition to the qualitative description of the effects of free trade agreements on the supply chain structure, an illustrative example based on the automotive industry is provided. The article concludes with an outlook on potential solution strategies.

There are numerous and relevant application domains like inspection, maintenance, surveillance, and handling of non-uniform goods where the use of robots would be beneficial. This article addresses the reasons that make it difficult for a present-day robot to master these domains. The dual arm system AILA will be presented, which takes further steps in the direction of such a use case.

These days, competitive advantages for manufacturing companies can not be achieved by a detached configuration of specific processes but only within an inte-grative configuration of the complete system factory. The deployed technologies and the manufactured products have a significant influence on the configuration of a factory. To allow a better coordination between technology, product and factory planning, an approach for integrated factory coordination has been developed at the Hannover Centre for Production Techno-logy (PZH). This approach is based on the general roadmapping idea and allows the systematisation of the information transfer concerning content and time between factory, technology and product planning.

Plant operators are getting more and more aware that operating costs are usually exceeding acquisition costs. For that reason there is an increased interest in methods like Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Weakness of these methods is their exclusive focus on costs. Because they do not allow differentiating benefits of various machines and plants, a holistic evaluation is difficult. The concept developed by the Institute of Production Engineering and Machine Tools (IFW) is concentrating on that issue, extending the Life Cycle Costing by a benefit assessment of investments.

The continuing change of producer markets towards buyer markets has a strong impact on the competition between manufacturing enterprises. As a strategic answer collaborative networks such as virtual corporations, virtual enterprises or virtual factories have been discussed since the beginning of the 90ies of last century. Many models and concepts supporting the life cycle of such organisations - consisting of the creation, operation and dissolution phases - have been presented. An important aspect in the creation phase is strategic planning. This phase is supported by concepts of long-term networks like industrial clusters or regional networks which act as a virtual breeding environment and which enable the short-term creation of virtual organisations. Especially this phase needs support of strategic planning which can be seen as a part of the strategic management process. This paper shows that such virtual breeding environments can be seen as complex systems and how system oriented ...

The development of changeable factory concepts influences the site competitiveness of producing companies. The impact of the underlying factory structure, the factory layout, and the logistics on the operating efficiency of a factory concept is unquestioned. The influence of future production technologies or products on the factory concept, however, is often neglected. In a cooperative project a new method has been derived which allows a holistic coordination of all three elements factory, technology and product.