continuous improvement

There are numerous analysis methods available to support engineers working on continuous improvement projects. Digital transformation facilitates to reduce the effort for data acquisition and processing. The Institute of Production Management and Technology and the medical company Dräger have jointly developed a web application for multi-method analysis. This article describes its data structure and technology.

Despite of proven immense impact on profitability, characterized with short payback periods and being recognized for its significance on the innovativeness and competiveness of a company, successful management of ideas is rare. An approach with prerequisites of a successful exception is the Corporate Capability Management (CCM) from Fraunhofer Austria. CCM is defined as the systematic and holistic approach to ongoing improvements on organization’s capabilities. The approach comprehends discrepancies between research findings on critical success factors and contemporary industrial practices.

The main goal of a company is to conduct target oriented rationalization efforts. Thus, the challenges are, among others, to transparence, to bundle, to adapt, to re-interpret and to develop personal and organizational competencies for a systematic and methodic planning, designing and implementing resp. a sustainable improvement of processes and value streams. This article describes the further developments of “Value Stream Mapping” (Value Stream oriented Process Management, Value Stream Mapping and MTM, evaluation of alternative value streams, cost development of value streams by changing input parameters). Existing, implicit knowledge will be explicated and systematically bundled along the value stream from different departments of a company. The personal and organizational system and method competencies are therefore available to evaluate improvement measures and to perform their implementation target oriented.

The view on quality as a critical competitive factor has been established not only in Western countries but is on the rise in emerging markets, too. In the complex of products and rising customer expectations, many companies try to reduce costs and increase the market opportunities for their products by applying broad-based quality initiatives. Normatively distinct quality management offers only few instructions for these approaches, which is constraining the success of the initiatives. Within the framework of an international study on quality management in manufacturing companies, critical success factors and best practices have been identified on the way to the sustainable establishment of effective quality management. On basis of a developed maturity assessment tool, companies are given the ability to identify the status of their own quality management in comparison to best practice.

Continuous attempt for improvement as well as the permanent impulse to explore and eliminate failures and flaws belong to the classical quality mindset, which is also reflected in CIP approaches. However, it is often difficult to systematically identify improvement potentials with minimal expenses, especially in knowledge intensive business processes. A purposefully combined disciplines and instruments of quality management, process management and knowledge management enables the development of a maturity model adjusted to the needs of SME. This maturity model, based on the methods of CIP, serves to uncover the potentials in the knowledge process. The following contribution demonstrates the development, application as well as the value of employing the quality-oriented maturity model for knowledge intensive business processes.

The laboratory for machine tools WZL of RWTH Aachen University and Scheidt & Bachmann have jointly developed a methodology for product structure oriented continuous improvement of products and processes. The staff members’ manifold experience with complex products is used effectively by a combination of a product structure oriented assessment and a production portfolio oriented interpretation. Hence, experiences are quantified by the metric “additional effort of time per single use”. This additional effort addresses the coordination and correction expenses, which are typically not quantified and handled by variety-neutral surcharges in the calculation scheme. The methodology is working on the basis of “As-Is” data and not as usual on the basis of planning data like in conventional approaches of variant management. The factual composition of the products is used instead. By applying the methodology for several product families, latent optimization potential could be determined ...