Flexibility management

Quick and coordinated adaptation of production capacity to fluctuating market demands among all participating companies is currently an essential requirement for maintaining competitiveness in value creation chains based on a division of labor. To meet this demand, it is always important for a company to find the most economical operating point for its own production.

The benefits

With its technical and methodological expertise in designing needs-based resource management in production, Fraunhofer IML is the ideal partner for answering the following questions:

• How quickly and to what extent can production capacity can be raised or decreased?
• What measures must be initiated by which process? What is to be considered?
• What costs will be incurred by these adaptation measures?
• What effect will these have on production costs?
• What is the ideal operational organization for various load conditions?

The Production Logistics department will help you find the most economical operating organization for different job loads and help you develop timetables for a well-defined and efficient adaptation of the available capacity, enabling you to respond more quickly and purposefully to the dynamics of the market in the future.

Our approach

Starting from a load profile of the market, which describes the challenges regarding the temporal evolution of market demand (seasonality), delivery capabilities, restocking times and manufacturing costs, we help our clients develop different flexibility profiles for production and evaluate them in terms of their basic feasibility and cost-effectiveness. Your staff and their functional flexibility will be assigned a key position. For example, via activity structure analyses, we will uncover existing operational flexibility and create a basis for the needs-directed development of work areas.