Flexibility Profiles

Analysis and Configuration of Strategies for Adaptation of Manufacturing Capacity (diss.)

Researcher:

Lutz Gottschalk

Partner:

flexis AG (Stuttgart, Germany), DaimlerChrysler (Germany), FISBA OPTIK AG (St. Gallen, Switzerland), Hilti AG (Schaan, Princ. Liechtenstein)

Financed by:

The Professorship’s own resources

Motivation:

The production environment of many industrial companies in the most diverse branches is charac-terized today by numerous risks and uncertainties. A special factor is the consistent customer orien-tation that has become established in most branches of the economy in the last three decades due to the transition from a seller’s to buyer’s market. Thus, today there are often great difficulties con-nected with long-term and in part medium-term forecasting of customer requirements as to desired products or product family variants, quantities, and supply times. In addition, requirements for short lead times and delivery reliability continue to increase. One instrument for handling these require-ments and uncertainties is flexible adaptation of production capacity. In industrial practice, various technical and organizational solution concepts are known that range from work time models to temporary outsourcing of parts of the value chain to investment in additional production resources. From this arises the need within the entire production planning process to select and provide at the right time appropriate measures for capacity adaptation.

Objectives:

In addition to formulating a functional and clearly defined quantitative flexibility concept , the goal is to answer two main questions from the operations perspective: Are the available options for capacity adaptation sufficient, judging by the expected future uncertainties in customer demand? What measures for flexible adaptation of capacity, or configuration of measures, are economic under specific conditions?

Project results:

As a first step, a simple approach for exact, quantitative description of fluctuations of capacity requirements and production capacity was developed. The basis for this was the analysis of relevant problems in industry that was conducted in the framework of the LicoPro research project. The analysis showed that in addition to considering changing capacity, which can be accomplished using an adaptation measure, the aspects of time and costs [...] must be taken into account in order to completely capture the capacity flexibility of a work system. Based on that, using Flexibility Profiles for individual and linked manufacturing systems, it was possible to develop an easy to use, but transparent method for depicting the maximum possibilities of a system for capacity adaptation over time.
In a step that goes further, the quantitative description can be utilized for configuration and monetary evaluation of alternative strategies for capacity adaptation to known or expected demand scenarios. For that purpose a prototype of planning software was developed and tested in collaboration with flexis AG. Finally, the entire concept was adapted to several industrial application environments, where its usability and value for the industrial practice could be demonstrated successfully.

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