Requirements For A Model Of Agile Factory Planning

Abstract

Factory planning has become a permanent task in industrial companies due to an increasingly dynamic and complex environment. The necessary involvement of a large number of experts from different disciplines in the planning process further leads to an increased coordination effort. In addition, in the early planning stage, there is often only fuzzy data available, and the planning procedure is characterised by numerous uncertainties. In order to react adequately to comparable complexity influences and uncertainties, agility is often recommended in the literature. In order to introduce agility in a targeted and structured manner in factory planning, a factory planning procedure is required that basically has a modular structure suitable for implementing agility and integrates all planning disciplines. In addition, the complexity of factory planning tasks must be reduced to an application-oriented level and linked as well as classified in terms of time. Agility must be holistically integrated into this factory planning procedure and its applicability must be ensured through detailed descriptions and visualisations. When integrating agility in factory planning, it is also important to check in each individual case, company- and project-related, which degree of agility makes sense and how the concrete implementation can be designed in the planning procedure. Since factory planning projects can differ greatly from one another, it is not possible to make a general statement about which agile elements offer which degree of support. The aim of this paper is to define the requirements for an agile factory planning model under these premises.