process

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 ...

The integration of mechanical, electronical and informational components characterizes modern technical products. These mechatronic systems usually provide high product functionality by which the product complexity is increased. Handling this complexity confronts the manufacturer with technical but also organizational challenges. The improvement potentials of the existing development processes are analyzed as a possibility of facing the organizational aspects. For that reason a maturity model is developed that identifies the weaknesses in detail and shows the next steps for improving the interdisciplinary development process.

In product creation, time reduction and increasing of innovation ability will be enabled by new innovations of methods and technologies for virtual engineering. The idea of virtual engineering is a holistic approach of a collaborative, virtual and integrated product creation. Therefore, individual, application-oriented configuration and an interoperable integrated IT-environment are required. Moreover, virtual engineering deals with adoption and optimisation of methods and tools for management of environments for product creation.