Framework for Integration and Substitution of Process Technologies in Existing Production Systems Under Consideration of Limited Technology Experiences

Abstract

Due to the increasing demand and the transformation of the automotive industry, immense capacities for the production of electric drives have been built up in recent years. When building up these capacities, manufacturing companies are facing enormous time pressure, which is intensified by the fact that planners often only have little experiences with the used technologies. As a result, entire production lines or larger sections of production lines are assigned to machine suppliers in so-called closed tenders. Those tenders are more product-oriented than process-oriented, so that the machine supplier has the process responsibility. From the point of view of manufacturing companies, the reason for this approach lies primarily in the reduction of risk and interfaces. Production systems are handed over to the manufacturing companies ready for use after planning and installation. This results in the risk of the manufacturing company, as system operator, becoming technologically dependent on the machine supplier in some cases. In addition, market dynamics mean that individual technologies are continuously being developed further. This raises the question of how to ensure that changes to existing production systems can be implemented in the most time- and cost-efficient way possible, taking into account the conditions in the industry, such as a lack of experience on the operator side, the dynamics in the availability of new technologies and the multilateral project constitution consisting of machine suppliers and operators. For that purpose, this paper presents a framework that can be used to systematically identify and assess the risks related with the substitution of individual technologies in a disruptive environment. In addition, measures for risk reduction for technology substitutions are derived, considering the lack of experiential knowledge. The framework is presented at the example of hairpin stator production.