Business Case 1
Business Case 1 is based on the collaboration of the German company Brüggen Oberflächen- und Systemlieferant GmbH and the Polish company TNS Sp.z.o.o. which are co-operatively producing in relatively small batches special, customised, change over platforms for lorries.
Brüggen Oberflächen- und Systemlieferant GmbH was founded in 1990 by Bernhard Brüggen. There was a fast development of business relations with the trailer manufacturer KRONE in Werlte. Thus Metal Service Brüggen entered virgin territory. The company increased in size with the assigned duties. Presently Brüggen is the market leader in its business field, having one of the biggest and most modern surface coating systems in Europe.
TNS Sp.z.o.o. provides welding and assembly services for metal structures both at TNS facilities or at the facilities of their customers. TNS product portfolio includes manufacturing of metal construction, vehicle chassis, trailers & semi-trailers, construction parts for bucket depth & mechanical shovel excavators, metal containers, road bridge steel constructions. TNS is also active in installation of pipelines, ducts, tanks, cooling, heating ventilation systems and environmental control systems.
From mid 90's TNS is cooperating with Brüggen, especially overtaking welding tasks. Qualified welders and fitters are working in close cooperation with Brüggen, enabling a fully integrated and synchronised production.
The business case generally aims at an improvement of the collaboration of Brüggen and TNS. As a key vision it is expected to realise an ad-hoc collaboration of relevant actors of both organisations (i.e. specifically production manager and foremen) to enable a harmonised 'situation dependent' rescheduling at Brüggen and line reconfiguration at both companies. Key business processes concerned with respect to the envisaged improvements of the collaboration between Brüggen and TNS are presented in the following Figure.
The key improvement strategy targeted by Brüggen and TNS is to realise order related production process as early as possible and to consistently trace the production progress per order over all production cells. From human centric point of view the strategic improvement is concerning the order tracking, not to impose additional efforts on workers in the shop floor and to improve the communication between the respective staff members in both companies, which are responsible for reliable rescheduling and reconfiguration activities.
Therefore, after realising the envisaged improvements, specifically the collaboration with respect to planning and control of the assembly and manufacturing lines shall be enabled, to easily reschedule the customer orders and reconfigure the lines according to the product variants (and volume) to be manufactured/ assembled.
From human centric point of view the following general aspects shall be taken into account:
- realising interconnections of the production planning and control systems in the companies,
- intensively supporting human operators to
- avoid repetitive tasks, like searching for planning relevant information,
- facilitate complex tasks like rescheduling of interconnected production lines and
- make available distributed knowledge.
The envisaged AmI system with its different AmI features shall enable to eliminate the identified weak points and specifically support the concerned human operators in the execution of their tasks in the business process.