Potentials and procedure for the integrated planning of production technologies in the early phases of product development

Because of their associated rationalization potentials, innovations in material and processes have a decisive influence on company competitiveness. With existing production processes and manufacturing cycles, technical product improvements and process optimizations generally lead to only marginal cost reductions and quality improvements, whereas the use of technological innovations to radically redesign entire production cycles can yield substantial cost advantages. It is also possible to achieve a decisive improvement in the properties of the developed object in terms of product and production requirements. In order to exploit the potential of innovative production technologies through innovations in materials and processes, it is necessary to determine their specific application potentials at an early stage of product development. This allows an adequate consideration of specific material and process constraints during the design and layout of the product. It is necessary to ensure that planning cycles involved in the process of product and process design run in parallel, so that development times can be shortened. However, this entails the use of unreliable technological or product-related information. An early consideration of production technology innovation potentials during the product development process is, however, often prevented by a lack of organizational resources, by a lack of methodology and by incomplete or unreliable information concerning product specifications and opportunities for applying alternative production technologies. Against this background, it is essential to develop new and to improve existing methods and resources which can ensure systematic planning of technology resources and simultaneously shorten product development times.