Montage

Assembly processes are characterized by increasing complexity. Fast ramp-up is a question of vital importance due to the high invests for production lines. A key factor to success is the integrated reuse of experience concerning similar machines and processes. In many cases experiences from shop floor level remain unused in new projects. A main obstacle on production level is to identify and record experience rapidly and precisely. This concept was developed on the base of the Delphi-Method to process experiences of employees effectively and efficiently.

To an increasing degree process stability and documentation gain in importance on manual workstations because of the demand to lot size 1 and the duty of flexibility. To ensure efficiency increase regarding to harder quality guidelines, the flow of information to the worker and back have to be optimised and realised resistant against failures and information loss. The use of multi-medial, IT-based worker information systems to assist workers conducting their tasks and to enable a backflow of relevant information like quality data, waste quantities etc. with current technical methods offers a possible solution.

Turbulent business environments force enterprises to ever faster answers and adaptions in order to secure their competitive ability. Mutability and responseability as crucial success factors are based finally on knowledge, which must be continuously improved and renewed. The article shows starting points and how ontology based knowledge management can be used purposefully for the increase of the mutability in and by enterprises and in particular in the assembly.