product change

With time, products lose their attractiveness on the market, technology becomes outdated or customer demands are no longer met. To keep up success, companies need to replace old products. This means a huge amount of product changes for a manufacturer that differentiates through customer-focused product design and continuous product innovations. Ramp-up and phase-out-management are critical factors of success. As the product life cycles shorten due to the dynamism of the technology and markets, payback periods for the development costs reduce, too. In order to maintain profitability or to increase it, it is necessary to minimise the cost and time of product changes. This article shows how logistics contribute handling a lot of complex ramp-ups and phase-outs with optimal cost and in a short time.

For an efficient implementation of technical product changes, industrial companies need to use a goal-oriented procedure as well as an effective application of already existing knowledge about previous product changes. Mostly, product changes are implemented by using standardised workflows, which are controlled and documented by common workflow-management-systems. The administration effort of these systems often causes delayed implementation of product changes. In this context companies try to optimise the product change process by implementing new application systems and by integrating existing isolated applications in these systems. The organisation of subgroups, who finally implement the product change, is often neglected. Thereby, the development of new approaches in this area may close the gaps in order to make knowledge available.