Handling resource efficiency in production of small and medium sized enterprises

For years, production companies have faced an increasingly complex and rapidly changing market, which results in higher client customization. These coupled with a high complexity of cause-effect relationships of industries, globally-dispersed markets, technologies and economic areas create great challenges to the manufacturing systems. Uncertain projections about future sales, fluctuations in quantities, new manufacturing technologies and shorter product life cycles with changing product requirements, at the same time with an increasing range of variants requires a continuous transformation of production structures to the current requirements on the market. As a consequence, methods for evaluating a company's production flexibility are of great significance. The following article discusses the experience gained in research results in medium-sized production. The use of the IT-framework “WertProNET” that emerged from these results shows the impact that production changes have on economical plant operation, and how unnecessary additional costs from the inefficient use of resources can be avoided.