Mehrskalige Belastungsregelung in der variantenreichen Serienfertigung von KMU

The business environment is called turbulent. On the other hand, the adaptability of production structures is limited. The value-adding workload has to be kept above a minimum that is determined by fixed costs. Therefore, beside a permanent adaption, a continuous process that aims at actively influence the workload and reduce avoidable losses is necessary. In doing so, product planning is the main starting point for SME with a multi-variant series production. This paper presents a broad approach for a multi-scale workload control system that extends the existing feedback control systems of product and production planning. It focuses on an information system in the field of business intelligence that continuously presents essentials for short-term and long-term decisions in product planning. Based on operative data, especially the duration of processes, it calculates the spreading of process time, the amount of process time depending on product properties as well as the section of workload for each element of the product structure. In order to address various scales of planning and therefore various time horizons of decisions, all relevant levels of product and production structure can be linked in a flexible way. A new reference input is presented and termed capacity yield as it allows to continuously evaluate the multi-scale workload control system. A multi-dimensional data model and the corresponding calculations as well as a visualization have been applied to a software prototype called performance measuring system for multi-scale workload control (LMEB). It has been successfully integrated into a small enterprise. The validation was based on two case studies of two different products. It proves the applicability of the approach for a multi-scale workload control system as well as the usability of the LMEB