change management

Change Management and transformability of factories are usually not planned in an integrated way today. While Change Management focuses solely on the change process itself, this process is mostly ignored in the planning process of a transformable factory. The synthesis of these two approaches allows a holistic support of change processes, in order to promote innovations for example, upgrade employee competencies and use the planned technological, spatial and organisational transformability thoroughly.

Unlike common opinion the efficiency of product development projects can be increased by the application of workflow-management-systems. The basis for this provides a reference model for workflow-supported product development which classifies the required workflow types and software tools for the different tasks in the project. For the frequent case of a change management process it will be shown how different variants of this process can be configured through workflow modules and which interdependencies between workflow and project management system occur.

Knowledge Management is for many projects a future target whereby the potential of using KM during the project is unfortunately neglected. This starts with the project teams who know nothing about each other and continues with the way in which knowledge management concepts are designed: “in private”. The article describes connections between process optimisation, enterprise culture and knowledge management as well as the “KM²” procedure in the joint project WISMA, where the acceptance for changes and authentic handling during the project is the focal point right from the beginning.

An increasing customer-driven rate of individualisation as well as the lack of brand loyalty is leading to a greater competition within the automotive industry. Project organisations integrate innovations and technologies into the product under enormous permanent pressure. Especially the defined targets concerning time-to-market, costs, and quality set new challenges to the project management throughout the often decentralised innovation network of engineering partners and manufacturers.

Changeable enterprises are sustainably focussing market and technology changes ranging from a short term up to long term view to maintain market success under changing market and environment conditions. The specific addressing of competence development can provide a significant contribution to changeable conditions. For these both, adaptive reactions to present changes as well as preventative planning addressing future changes are needed. To support the changeability of an enterprise holistic competence management approaches can be used. They allow to match supply and demand of competence and to design corresponding concepts for competence development.