Stefan Dany

Iterative Improvement of Process Planning Within Individual and Small Batch Production

Present challenges of small batch production are represented by the need to improve time-to-market and the reduction of costs. A promising approach to take up these challenges is the use of highly iterative development processes such as Scrum known from software development. A transfer of these principles to process planning enables the prediction of producibility of customer orders by iteratively learning from manufacturing data of similar jobs from the past. Based on the required data structures described in this paper, work plans for new orders can be generated automatically. The potential of the approach is validated by an industrial example.

Reduction of Decision Complexity as an Enabler for Continuous Production Network Design

Today, the continuous design of production networks is challenging due to their high complexity and diverging interests of individual sites. In order to increase the efficiency and agility of global producing companies, this paper presents a method that shifts the often-present focus on locations towards a market and production process oriented design approach of production networks. By subdividing the product range into product families, the complexity of decision-making processes is reduced. Subsequently, target conflicts between product families are resolved systematically from an overall corporate view by deriving the smallest possible holistic decision scope. The method was applied to a machine tool manufacturer.

Ganzheitliche Gestaltung von Lean

Kurzfassung Unabhangig vom Lean-Reifegrad der Produktion, stehen Lean-Manager vor der Herausforderung, Lean Aktivitaten in indirekten Unternehmensbereichen zu initiieren. Mit der Ausweitung auf die gesamte Auftragsabwicklung, gewinnt die Auseinandersetzung mit Werte- und Verhaltensmustern der Stakeholder neben der Anwendung von Lean-Methoden an Bedeutung. Vor diesem Hintergrund wurde der Arbeitskreis Lean Administration mit Fach- und Fuhrungskraften aus Industrieunternehmen gestartet. Unter der Leitung des Lehrstuhls fur Produktionssystematik des Werkzeugmaschinenlabors WZL der RWTH Aachen wurde in einer Workshopreihe ein Phasenmodell als Orientierungsrahmen zur Gestaltung ganzheitlicher Lean-Initiativen erarbeitet.