Static and dynamic Assessment of sociotechnical manufacturing systems

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Fritz Klocke
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 233161889

Process control and technical know-how are the unique factors of Germany as a manufacturing location. In current due diligence processes, which are applied during the acquisition of capital or purchase of company shares, production-technological aspects are often completely disregarded.Thus, the scientific object of the proposed research project is to develop a method which enables fundamental modeling and evaluation of socio technical manufacturing systems. According to systems theory the first step is to build and operationalize a functional model in order to collect and describe the property profiles of the production means and technological skills. In addition the organization of socio technical manufacturing systems is an elementary factor for its dynamic characterization. Therefore, within the scope of this research project a design model for a target-oriented organization of production systems will be developed.Furthermore, relations between these subsystems should be evaluated and emergent properties identified. Subsequently, they will be integrated in a holistic model to describe the socio technical production system. Based on this holistic model a method to evaluate the production-technological potential of the company will be derived. Furthermore, the response of the socio technical system to shifts of the market such as the change of the variants, product range and production volume is modeled and evaluated.In the context of this research project a description model for socio technical manufacturing systems will be developed. For the first time fundamental relations and emergent properties will be analyzed and described.Using a holistic assessment of the socio technical system Information asymmetries between investors or financial service providers and company owners during technology oriented transactions can be reduced. Furthermore, the research results can be used to analyze production systems and to discover optimization possibilities. This also reflects the economic benefit of this fundamental research project.The increasingly fast and global transfer of information is one of the main factors contributing to the change in production structures. On the one hand global und simple access to information strengthens the implementation of new ideas in products and production technologies. On the other hand information concerning competences of companies is made available quicker and may be imitated. Therefore, the purpose of the second period is to expand the developed method by adding the aspects of imitation- and substitution resistance of the used production system.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants