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Motivation

Being in a permanent change cycle, manufacturing companies have to set up methods for managing changes internally and across company borders. These methods shall enable the efficient realisation of changes and keep or improve the agility of the manufacturing systems and networks. Reason for this permanent change cycle is the growing demand for manufacturing of products with higher quality and variety. All within an international environment that is characterized by fierce competition. Thus the manufacturing industry is facing a number of significant challenges such as:

How to design and innovate best.
How to understand constantly shifting customer needs.
How to produce the products that meet those needs within tight budget and time constraints.

Agile production, virtual enterprise and holistic manufacturing concepts mostly cope with the improvement of manufacturing agility. The X-Change project increases manufacturing agility by focussing on the one hand on flexibility aspects by utilizing flexibility indicators and on the other hand by integrating these into existing change management processes to support the decision making process.

Lifecycle of production system

General Facts

Over the past few decades, the way products are designed and manufactured has been dramatically changed. Studies indicate that in high-tech sectors:

In this context X-Change aims to a higher flexibility and aims to integrate change management processes into a X-Change lifecycle platform that enables production systems and networks to fulfil more requirements or to adapted more efficiently to new circumstances. The successful X-Change development and deployment tend to meet several quantified specific objectives explained in the section "Objectives".