Open Access

Christopher Schlick, Günther Schuh, Fritz Klocke, Robert Schmitt, Dirk Abel, Christian Brecher, Burkhard Corves, Thomas Gries, Christian Hopmann, Sabina Jeschke, Achim Kampker, Peter Loosen, Reinhart Poprawe, Uwe Reisgen, Wolfgang Schulz, Martina Ziefle, Felix Bertelsmeier, Matthias Blum, Marco Faber, Yves-Simon Gloy, Gunnar Keitzel, Alexander Mertens, Henning Petruck

• Production in high-wage countries can be made more efficient, cost-effective, and flexible by solving the conflict between planning and value orientation. A promising approach is to focus on planning and decision-making processes (production planning and control, design of production processes and machinery, etc.) and to aim to maximize overall planning efficiency. Planning efficiency can be expressed as the ratio between the benefit generated by preparing detailed process instructions to produce the parts or components and the corresponding planning efforts. Industrial companies wanting to gain a competitive advantage in dynamic global markets have to identify a set of non-dominated solutions with the most favorable effort–benefit ratio rather than a single solution. The optimum between detailed planning and the immediate implementation of value-adding activities (process steps) in the process chain needs to be found dynamically for each product.