Approach for matching production technology capabilities with strategic product requirements

In the established product development process the production is mostly not integrated in the long-term strategic product planning due to the missing product concepts. This can lead to immense manufacturing challenges or even the loss of production capability because of the lacking capabilities of the in-house production technologies. As result needed production steps are costly bought, which leads to process inflexibilities and know-how loss. Or product designs need to be adapted for internal production, which leads to long product development processes and long time-to-market. Therefore, the integration of knowledge about the capabilities of the existing production technologies in the long-term strategic product planning is essential. This way the feasibility as well as the consequences of the new product on the production system can be identified early. To do so, the future product requirements and the production capabilities need to be abstracted and balanced to allow a communication on the same detail level. Currently not much literature exists, which describes the knowledge integration of the production capabilities in the long-term strategic product planning. To compensate this deficit, this paper presents an approach for an integrated planning, which outlines the integration processes as well as the abstraction of necessary information.