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The efficient dealing with the dynamic environment of production industries is one of the most challenging tasks of Supply Chain Management in high-wage countries. Relevant and current information are still not used sufficiently, to handle the influence of the dynamic environment on intra- and inter-company order processing adequately. Among other things, the problem is caused by missing or delayed feedback of relevant data. As a consequence of that, planning results differ from the actual situation of production. High Resolution Supply Chain Management describes an approach aiming on high information transparency in supply chains in combination with decentralized, self-optimizing control loops for Production Planning and Control. The final objective is to enable manufacturing companies to produce efficiently and to be able to react to order-variations at any time, requiring process structures to be most flexible.
Industrial production in high-wage countries like Germany is still at risk. Yet, there are many counter-examples in which producing companies dominate their competitors by not only compensating for their specific disadvantages in terms of factor costs (e.g. wages, energy, duties and taxes) but rather by minimising waste using synchronising integrativity as well as by obtaining superior adaptivity on alternating conditions. In order to respond to the issue of economic sustainability of industrial production in high-wage countries, the leading production engineering and material research scientists of RWTH Aachen University together with renowned companies have established the Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries”. This compendium comprises the cluster’s scientific results as well as a selection of business and technology cases, in which these results have been successfully implemented into industrial practice in close cooperation with more than 30 companies of the industrial production sector.
Manufacturing companies of the machinery and equipment industry find themselves more than ever exposed to a rapidly changing competitive environment. In particular, the resulting diversity of planning and control processes confronts organisations and information systems with a significant coordination effort. To this day, planning and execution of order processing – from offer processing to the final shipment of the product – is still a part of the production planning and control (PPC), which is almost entirely integrated into information systems. Though, in order to manage dynamic influences on processes within order processing, there can be found a deficiency in the processing of decision-relevant and real-time information. Partly, the reason for this is a missing or incorrect feedback of process relevant data, so that the planning results, gained by the use of information systems, differ to the current process situation.
The concept of Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II) still represents the central logic of production planning and control. However, the centralised and push-oriented MRP II planning logic is not able to plan and measure dynamic processes adequately, which, due to diverse disturbances, often occur in production environments. Furthermore, specific weaknesses of MRP II-based systems are the lack of support for order releases, the planning principle based on average values and the successive planning method as well as the use of limited partial models. As a result a successive planning method leads to a dissection of PPC-tasks into smaller work packages and so strides away from a holistic approach and the achievement of an optimal solution. Similarly, a planning, focusing on a general business objective system, using a partial planning approach due to isolated considerations is not possible. Insufficient consideration of the current load horizon and the current capacity utilization, non-existing or delayed feedback on order progress as well as faults and poor availability and transparency of information can be named as further weaknesses of MRP II-based systems.
One of the central success factors for production in high-wage countries is the solution of the conflict that can be described with the term “planning efficiency”. Planning efficiency describes the relationship between the expenditure of planning and the profit generated by these expenditures. From the viewpoint of a successful business management, the challenge is to dynamically find the optimum between detailed planning and the immediate arrangement of the value stream. Planning-oriented approaches try to model the production system with as many of its characteristics and parameters as possible in order to avoid uncertainties and to allow rational decisions based on these models. The success of a planning-oriented approach depends on the transparency of business and production processes and on the quality of the applied models. Even though planning-oriented approaches are supported by a multitude of systems in industrial practice, an effective realisation is very intricate, so these models with their inherent structures tend to be matched to a current stationary condition of an enterprise. Every change within this enterprise, whether inherently structural or driven by altered input parameters, thus requires continuous updating and adjustment. This process is very cost-intensive and time-consuming; a direct transfer onto other enterprises or even other processes within the same enterprise is often impossible. This is also a result of the fact that planning usually occurs a priori and not in real-time. Therefore it is hard for completely planning-oriented systems to react to spontaneous deviations because the knowledge about those naturally only comes a posteriori.
High Resolution Supply Chain Management (HRSCM) aims to stop the trend of continuously increasing planning complexity. Today, companies in high-wage countries mostly strive for further optimization of their processes with sophisticated, capital-intensive planning approaches. The capability to adapt flexibly to dynamically changing conditions is limited by the inflexible and centralized planning logic. Thus, flexibility is reached currently by expensive inventory stocks and overcapacities in order to cope with rescheduling of supply or delivery. HRSCM describes the establishment of a complete information transparency in supply chains with the goal of assuring the availability of goods through decentralized, self-optimizing control loops for Production Planning and Control (PPC). HRSCM pursues the idea of enabling organization structures and processes to adapt to dynamic conditions. The approach includes the strengths of the existing planning models as well as the process of decision making in organizations. A precondition for this decentralized adaptation is the synchronization of the objectives of the several units or process owners. The basis for this new PPC Model are information transparency, stable processes, consistent customer orientation, increased capacity flexibility and the understanding of the production system as a viable, socio-technical system.
Analysis of the Harmonizing Potential of Order Processing Attributes in Spread Production Systems
(2010)
The paper discusses an approach how to measure the competitive advantage of harmonized order processing data by making use of knowledge about the interdependencies between related benefit dimensions. Corresponding harmonization projects are all projects that strive for common structures in product attributes, classification systems or product structures. The main objective of the underlying research work is the development of a method for the estimation of the benefit potential of harmonized order processing data.