Besides product development, production planning is arguably the most important process to take place within the creation of a product. However, the growing demands placed on production systems and their ongoing improvement pose ever new and difficult challenges to production planning. While there is a significant increase in changes within production planning and operations, there is at the same time an unwavering expectation for all the direct and indirect processes to retain their quality and efficiency, or even for these to improve. Currently, many manufacturers lack comprehensive and seamless management for the change processes occurring between planning and the shop floor – particularly when it comes to cross-location, cross-disciplinary, and crossdepartmental planning and heterogeneous technical support of the planning processes. There simply are no sufficient organizational and technical solution concepts to provide for the comprehensive mapping and processing of changes between production planning and operations, to uniformly capture and track change measures, and to sensibly forecast and coordinate the capacities required for change processes in the planning and production departments.

The PSI/VDA recommendation at hand addresses this challenge. Its Manufacturing Change Management (MCM) defines a reference sequence of steps for managing the changes between planning and the shop floor. To define this reference process, the recommendation first discusses how MCM fits into the business environment and identifies the main participants of the change processes. Next, the best possible structural steps involved in the processing of a change enquiry are detailed, and the typical tasks and their extents are described. Leading on from the conceptual basis of the MCM process, its suitability for specific applications within companies is then discussed in reference to relevant use cases. Next, the recommendation shows how to work out a softwarebased support structure for the concept and implemented as a prototype.

The key element of the software-based implementation is to map the changes within a superordinate change list – this significantly improves the transparency and coordination of a company’s change activities. This solution makes it possible for the first time to view the statuses of change requests and their planning versions, to match measures to each other, and to trigger follow-up changes based on production system characteristics. Exactly how the software is deployed varies considerably depending on how its users are placed within their company. While an MCM coordinator, for example, requires a wide-ranging and complete overview of all the changes and how they are connected to the production system, an employee who processes the change enquiries needs specific predefined views in order to interact with the changes adequately. Lastly, the solution provides an easy-to-use practical tool for initiating change enquiries. This can be deployed flexibly on mobile devices such as tablet PCs on the shop floor.

The participating companies will test and further develop the practical deployment of the described developments over a series of pilot projects. This will expose the main challenges to the concept’s implementation and demonstrate very accurately the opportunities presented by MCM.