ramp-up

With time, products lose their attractiveness on the market, technology becomes outdated or customer demands are no longer met.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.

Production Ramp-Ups are crucial for an industrial companies´ success. Business processes have to be controlled throughout the entire Production Network, what could be ensured by the use of modern workflow-based control methods. So far it is still questionable what should be the workflow’s goal. Looking at a ramp-up along the supply chain the process consists of a large number of local ramp-ups. For this a prognosis system will be introduced which allows an educated guess on the development of the number of pieces during the ramp-up. The prognosis is founded on a knowledge-based approach and does rely on multivariate data analysis. This will lead to a ramp-up forecast which could offer strategic aims into workflow-based network control tools.

Due to shortening product life cycles, complex supplier networks and an increasing number of parties involved, the decision making process has become both more critical and more difficult. The complexity and dynamics of the ramp-up phase make it necessary to not try to concentrate the decisions in on hand, but rather distribute decisions among decentralized yet competent decision makers on-site. It is, however, necessary to provide the decentralized decision makers with the basis and the capability of decision making, and a joint target system to ensure optimal outcome. The paper presents a heuristic approach to design and operate production ramp-up appropriate to stable and efficient ramp-up processes.

Nowadays the ramp-up of products is a decisive influence parameter in business competition, therefore it is a crucial component for the competitiveness of a company. Being able to place products on the market in shorter periods of development and at the same time improve quality, while managing constant diversification, is a challenge companies manufacturing series products must face. This paper is a style guide demonstrating actual weak points and problems in product development revealed by a survey and interviews.

The answer to engineering change and event management within a supplier network is collaborative ramp-up management, because it achieves transparency and defined structures in the ramp-up planning and steering processes. The usage of the ramp-up demonstrator, developed by the IML, simplifies the serial start-up within a supplier network. The ramp-up demonstrator is a combination of order-to-delivery simulation and current workflow management concepts, by which a controllable and plannable ramp-up environment is achieved.

The ramp-up of a production system is a part of the product creation process. In a highly dynamic and complex sur-rounding, it is more then every other phase characterised by an immediate call for action. This challenge can be met by designing production systems in a way that they offer a maximum of flexibility and transparency. In this context, planning a robust ramp-up means designing production systems that are flexible enough to balance transient state working systems and that are easy to handle in order to achieve a steep learning curve. How this can concretely be implemented, which are the benefits of the actual planning methods and -tools for the production, and what a company has to do to tap the full potential is demonstrated at two examples from the automotive supply industry.

Today, an efficient product ramp-up is a precondition of the success of a company. The ramp-up management provides the coordination and management of the ramp-up process. The Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation and the company Schnitzer Anlauf- und Projektmanagement GmbH has developed a tool for analysing the product ramp-up process in order to achieve potentials for optimization. Ramp-up projects can be evaluated and best practices can be identified.

Approaches for a risk oriented ramp-up management can suit the purpose of closing the methodical gap between project management and production management. To develop management strategies for a risk oriented ramp-up management central ramp-up risks for a green field plant have been identified in the first step. A risk oriented scenario model leads to a quantification of possible effects resulting from the identified risks. To reach the goal of creating a ramp-up robust production system management strategies have been derived as constitutional elements of a preventive risk management. The management strategies aim at a minimisation as well as transformation of technical and organisational risks.

Due to shortening product life cycles and to the continuous enlargement of product ranges the ramp-up of production systems has become a significant criterion for innovation dynamics of producing companies. Besides the in-creasing technical complexity, a growing number of different parties are involved with different targets and interests. The result is a rising number of possible disturbances for the ramp-up process. In order to better control and shorten ramp-up projects, methods and tools have to be developed to manage the project along the complete value chain. The article gives an outlook on the ramp-up of the future by describing an approach that is the basis for a research project supported by the German ministry of research and education.