Production Controlling

Industrial companies must constantly adapt to new requirements resulting from global production chains, short delivery times and a dynamic market situation. Today, production and logistics are characterised by customer orientation and flexibility, which leads to the production of small batch sizes with many variants. In order to cope with the complexity, companies are focussing on lean corporate design that eliminates waste and concentrates on value-added processes; production controlling deals with precisely this task. The focus on key figures from different departments has been replaced by process-orientated key figures, which represents a new challenge for the measurability of production and logistics processes. In production controlling, a holistic approach is chosen to evaluate the success factors in day-to-day business and to structure key figures according to the value chain. In this way, production controlling illustrates the importance of KPI systems and the need to move from singular optimisations to holistic improvements in order to ensure competitiveness.

How can suitable KPIs be identified and successfully implemented? Fraunhofer IML supports and accompanies you step by step in the development, selection and introduction of new KPIs and production controlling.

The Fraunhofer IML process model, which is shown in the diagram (left), consists of five steps:

1. Firstly, the internal clientele (the decision-makers) is identified.
2. Based on their needs, all the information required for decision-making is identified.
3. In the next step, the presentation form of the key figures is determined. This has an influence on the final selection of the KPIs, as not every KPI is suitable for a particular form of presentation.
4. Based on the requirements identified and the existing definitions of individual KPIs, a corresponding selection of suitable KPIs can be made.
5. In the final step, the data required to collect the KPIs is recorded and the appropriate analysis methods are determined.