process chains

Nowadays factories have to withhold an ever rising pressure to succeed. Customer demands become more demanding and goods have to be available within shorter lead times and lower prices. Flexibility, reliability and resilience are key factors for companies. Against this background, there is a need in companies for constant analysis of their business processes. This is an addition to a paper that was published in the last issue of this journal. The first part focused on the general possibility of the two methods “Dortmunder Process Chain Model” and production characteristics curves and how they could be used to analyse factories in different detail levels. In this second part the focus is set more on the perspectives that both models base on. On the one hand there is the order flow perspective of the “Dortmunder Process Chain Model” and on the other hand the resource perspective of the production characteristics curves that have to be aligned.

Nowadays factories have to withhold an ever rising pressure to succeed. Customer demands become more demanding and goods have to be available within shorter lead times and lower prices. Flexibility, reliability and resilience are key factors for companies. Against this background, there is a need in companies for constant analysis of their business processes. The process perspective that was established in the industry since the 1980s will be addressed in the following by using the “Dortmunder Process Chain Model”. A permanent preparedness for change relies on being able to report about the plant’s status quo at all times. Therefore valuation methods and key figures are needed that represented by production characteristics curves in this paper. After an introduction to these two topics, the combination of both to one process based valuation method will be outlined. The intended methodology will represent a holistic decision model for plant controlling. This approach is being ...

Complex technologies of all industrial ranges require increasingly a holistic view of the entire technological process chains. In many methods processes are illustrated as already established and approved technological processes. The way up to an executable technological process is not supported. Straight in the technologically oriented R&D the know-how which is necessary for reproducible quality-assuring production is developed. In this paper new methods for the technologically oriented modelling and analysis of process chains are described which allow to effectively generate operational technology knowledge.

An important step of the production planning phases is manufacturing chain planning. In this phase the sequence has to be defined, in which a product is manufactured. The step should preferably be realized during the design phase to give feedbacks for the design department at the right time to initiate potential product changes. The following article introduces a system, which generates manufacturing chains in consideration of cost and tolerances. The focus is avoiding too close and cost intensive tolerances already in early manufacturing phases.

As a consequence of the increasing globalization many industrial companies see themselves forced to secure their competitive ability by an internationalization of their production locations. This requires a long-term planning of the future product structures and process chains, in order to control the variant variety and to protect the core competences. Objectives of the described method are a generation of variants close to the market and a bundling of the core competences.

In modern industry optical technologies stand for a leading innovative power influencing all sectors of economy and, thus, representing important factors within economic competition of coming markets. Regarding the manufacture of complex consumer optics the development of reasonable and flexible mass production processes is one of the dominant priority actions and ultra-precision machining technologies play a key role within this challenging task.