Concept of a Failures Management Assistance System for the Reaction on Unforeseeable Events during the Ramp-up

AbstractIn new product development processes the ramp-up phase is the most critical. For the first time the new product will be produced under standard production conditions. Thereby companies are facing enormous challenges relating to new products: increasing product and process complexities, less time-to-market and highest quality requirements. In addition to this, shorter product lifecycles cause frequent ramp-ups.Companies must develop skills to conquer these challenges especially in terms of developing professional ramp-up expertise. The transfer from prototype to scalable product causes many different unpredictable failures. Those failures require a strong failure management to guarantee the planned time-to-market. Key element in effective failure management is communication in this high interdisciplinary process. Today failure management in most companies is realized in task force mode. There is no system support from right failure notice, right failure classification and failure allocation to the right person to the point of effective support finding a solution as well as failure solution documentation. In addition to that there is no transparency about work in progress and allocated failures. The outcome of this is loss of time and inadequately documentation of failures which again causes loss of time.Hence the focus of this paper is on a CPS-tool realizing holistic failure management within the human acts as human sensor to solve those challenges. Objective at this juncture is the development of intelligent connection between responsibilities (ad-hoc organizations) in ramp-up and workflow strategies to reach efficient management applying tablet computer. Focused strategies are effort reducing, highest transparency and escalation scenarios