Concept For Databased Sales And Resource Planning For Re-Assembly In The Automotive Industry

Abstract

In linear economy, the growing wealth in the world is linked to a growing resource consumption and greenhouse gas emission. This results in a shortage of primary resources, environmental destruction through resource extraction, and global warming. A high productivity of the manufacturing industry, overcapacities and a decrease in the value of existing products intensify this situation. Circular economy offers resource-efficient value addition by multiple utilization of resources. One challenge in this form of value creation is the duration of reconditioning processes and the lack of product innovation in reconditioned products. To bring products back to the market as quickly as possible, the method of Re-Assembly is introduced and focused in this paper. Re-Assembly can be defined as reconditioning old products into new or higher-valued products, by assembling new or remanufactured parts and components after disassembly. However, manufacturing companies face difficulties in industrialization of such methods. In practice, one of the biggest challenges is the mid- and long term planning of the reconditioning process. Due to uncertainties in the quality and quantity of the returning end-of-life products the resulting reconditioning process is challenging to predict in terms of process time and production costs. To encounter this, this paper presents a concept for sales and resource planning in the context of Re-Assembly. In the first step the uncertainties for the long term production planning and the resulting data requirements are identified. Based on this, a concept for sales and resource planning is presented. The approach is based on the Internet of Production reference framework and includes data from the whole product lifecycle. As the area of application, the automotive industry is chosen as it is the largest manufacturing industry in Germany and already leading in the recording of usage data of their products.