Sebastian Schötz

Managing Complexity in Remanufacturing Focusing on Production Organisation

Due to individual requirements of economic actors, remanufacturing companies face the challenge of an increasing variety as well as the associated complexity. Therefore, a successful complexity management, created upon detailed knowledge of drivers and effects, is necessary. To close the lack of knowledge, the main complexity drivers and effects within the production organisation of remanufacturing companies are identified. Furthermore, common optimisation methods to manage this drivers and effects are assessed and the best ranked methods are shown within this paper. For the complexity effects, which occur the most and with a low number of available optimisation methods, new methods are presented.

Economically optimal non-destructive and destructive sampling inspection by attributes within the production

To avoid that defective units reach downstream production stages and cause a considerable amount of costs, quality control steps must be implemented. However, quality control steps cause further costs. Implemented sampling inspections are an opportunity to check the quality of lots within the production. In order to keep the costs to a minimum, the production planning must determine sample plans which incur the lowest costs. Due to the high number of different parameters and possible sample plans, this determination is extremely complicated. In order to deal with this issue, a tool to determine the economically optimal sample plan for destructive and nondestructive sampling inspection by attributes was developed. This paper describes the development of the tool as well as the procedure of the tool. The development is based on various sampling inspection related key figures and the international standard ISO 2859.

Identification of approaches for remanufacturing 4.0

The complexity within products, services and industrial production is constantly increasing. Due to the trend of mass production towards lot size ‘one’, topics like rationalization, optimization or Lean Management were followed by almost all companies during the last decades. Especially the industrial segment of remanufacturing is affected by this trend, which issues in small lot sizes and low volumes. Different strategies and approaches of Industry 4.0 were developed during the last years for the manufacturing but not for the remanufacturing industry. For this reason, the aim of this paper is to identify challenges of the remanufacturing industry and furthermore approaches of Industry 4.0 to face these challenges.