A Changeability Approach for Process Management and Decision Support on the shop Floor

This document contains an approach to map the changeability possibilities of machine tools used on the shop floor onto line management understandable business processes. The identified gap is a lack of information transparency on the line management level due to constraints, complexity and speed of a production process on the shop floor. Especially medium-sized enterprises in the supplier sector are forced to operate under strong time restrictions which are predetermined by original equipment manufacturers. Due to competitors and shareholders these enterprises often use a lean management approach which allows them on the one hand to produce under low costs but on the other hand handicaps them to react on disruptive events on the shop floor. We argue that nowadays industrial small and medium sized industrial enterprises have to have a fast reaction on changes and events. It is seen by the authors that changeability of production processes is an essential success factor in this globalized world. Because of the fact that more and more responsibility is handed over to the lower line management, the information support has to be improved in order to make them capable for choosing the best decision. In this paper a concept is shown how the lower management can reallocate production process steps in order to avoid penalty costs if a just in time production is requested by an original equipment manufacturer. To be able to do this, an information support concept for the lower management has to be established within the company to meet the requirements for choosing the best fitting reaction to a disruptive event. The future research concept is described after the analysis of an example production process scenario which is illustrated within this paper.