Processing of the production orders in sync with customer demand, on schedule, at short notice, with constant machine utilization, is the vision of many a plant manager. Besides machine and personnel productivity, stock volume is for this the clearest performance indicator. In large-scale production, this vision has quite successfully been approached through assembly lines with a continuous, pulled material flow and one-piece production. Especially in series and small series production with high variety, however, the same concepts are not applicable or not very successful. A sustainable way to approach the vision in such a setting is described in this paper based on the practical example of TRUMPF Grüsch AG.
