segmentation

The future of the German manufacturing sector and its seminal industry sectors is a matter of the corporate research project between McKinsey & Company and the Department for production management, technology and machine tools (PTW) at the TU Darmstadt. An innovative approach on segmenting different types of production within the manufacturing sector offers a differentiated view on the German production structure. A comparison with other European industrial nations offers the classification of the German manufacturing sector within an international context. Based on a status-quo scenario and with corresponding improvement methods for the production it is possible to set up a future scenario for strengthening the production in Germany.

Current information technologies like bar codes or transponders offer an enormous potential to logistics of producing companies. But with these technologies the provision of information on processes or components along the value-adding chain is neither possible in real-time nor consistently. Future components should be able to store information on themselves, so that additional transponders are no longer required. This opens up new possibilities for a real-time production planning and control as well as for the segmentation and planning of factories.