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In the near future, tooling companies will offer their customers not just maintenance services, but complex remote service packages for their engineering asset management, which is the total management of physical – not financial – assets. The overall goal is to enhance the efficiency of the engineering asset, e.g. to reduce TCO, on the customers´ site by means of value creating partnerships. These partnerships may be, e.g. the classical output or reliability partnership, but also process optimizing partnerships or lifecycle partnerships. The process optimizing partnership offers, e.g. the optimization of the system’s performance or the output quality, an optimized ramp-up and restart procedure or optimization of the production process parameters. The lifecycle partnership, on the other hand, accompanies the intelligent tool-machine-system throughout the whole lifecycle, which includes, e.g. provision of spare parts during the entire usage phase, storing, refurbishment, recycling and even the support of relocation of production facilities. Intelligent remote services have great potential for realizing all these partnerships.
To realize such engineering asset-related partnerships, two major tasks have to be done. First, there has to be the intelligent tool-machine system, which delivers the information that is required for these services. And furthermore, this information has to be integrated into the maintenance processes, so that it is delivered at the right place and time and in the required form. Second, the activities and processes that are combined to the engineering asset-related partnerships have to be configured out of standardized service and process modules. Therefore configuration logic is essential.
Entgegen der von Porter postulierten Inkompatibilität von Economies of Scale und Economies of Scope sind in Hochlohnländern produzierende Unternehmen in zunehmendem Maße herausgefordert, sowohl individuelle Kundenbedürfnisse zu befriedigen als auch gegen den Kostendruck globalisierter Märkte zu bestehen. Diese Herausforderung entspricht einer Auflösung der Scale-Scope-Dichotomie. Aufgrund der hochgradigen Interdependenz der strukturbildenden Elemente eines Produkt-Produktionssystems müssen diese zur Auflösung der Dichotomie in ihrem spezifischen Standardisierungsgrad aufeinander abgestimmt werden.
Diese Abstimmung entspricht der Aufgabenstellung der integrativen Bewertungs-und Konfigurationslogik, die im Folgenden präsentiert wird. Auf Basis eines integrierten Bewertungsmodells, das Produkt-Produktionssysteme in vier quantifizierbare Spannungsfelder gliedert, kann hierbei der aktuelle Betriebspunkt eines Produktionssystems analysiert werden. Über die gewonnenen Analyseergebnisse ermöglicht dieses Bewertungsmodell die Steuerung des Konfigurationsprozesses eines Produkt-Produktionssystems in Form einer Konfigurationslogik.
A company can choose between three generic competitive strategies. Alongside the strategy of cost leadership are the strategy of differentiation and the strategy of focussing on niches, although we will not be discussing this latter any further here. The strategy of cost leadership is based on the achievement of “economies of scale”, so generating advantage from the benefits of cost reduction, learning curve effects and automation. In the strategy of differentiation the focus is on “economies of scope” which enable the customer-specific products to be offered, but this is generally achieved only with an increase in the complexity of products and processes. In the past it was assumed that these two strategies were mutually exclusive, as an increase in the economies of scale basically leads to a reduction in the economies of scope, and vice versa. But in order to survive in the international competitive arena companies in the high-wage countries need increasingly to offer individually tailored products at competitive prices. The target to be aimed at is therefore customer-specific products at the cost of mass production, so resolving the dilemma between economies of scale and economies of scope. For this it is necessary to optimise the alignment of all the structural elements in both the product and its production, because of the high level of their interdependence.
The areas on which we will focus our review and designs in the following will be what are known as product-production systems, or more briefly, production systems. This topic includes not only the resources and processes of the value creation systems, but also the products produced and offered on the market by a company as one connected entity. In order to tackle the challenges mentioned above, it is necessary to make it possible to measure and compare the current position of any given production system on the see-saw between economies of scale and economies of scope, and then be able to redesign specific facets of them as a second phase. A method of integrative evaluation and design of production systems is presented below for this purpose.