No abstract

Due to increasing international competition, productive enterprises are currently searching for measures to improve their order processing. As the major potentialities for further improvements are strongly connected to the organization of production systems, the organizational performance has to be investigated and evaluated.The following paper presents four different approaches for evaluating the organizational performance and for revealing potentialities for improvements, namely: controlling, branch comparison, benchmarking and simulation. Based on a comparison of these approaches, a conceptive concept for evaluation will be developed.Considering certain prerequisites, four measures are defined in the shape of degrees of goal achievement. Such degrees of goal achievement compare the real performance of a production system to a theoretically optimal performance. The four measures refer to lead time, due-date dependability, utilization and work in progress of a production system.The concept for evaluation is connected to a simulation-aided approach in order to improve the organizational performance. This concept is demonstrated by using a case study of an enterprise of mechanical engineering as an example. The case study is performed with the simulation tool FEMOS and results in a proposal for the reorganization of the departments for design and operations planning. NEED FOR INDICATORSIn order to maintain their competitiveness, productive enterprises have to estimate their position in the market compared to competitors on one hand. On the other hand they must search for approaches to improve their over-all performance in order to stay in the market.Thereby, the organization of order processing becomes a dominating influence on performance, as technical means which might be used to support the performance of certain tasks are insufficient to meet all requirements [I, p. 133 ff], Regarding the order processing, it is of special interest to reveal possibilities for an improvement and to quantify potentialities by all possible means.In order to evaluate the quality and discover such potentialities of an organizational structure, special indicators can be used. In the following, different approaches to evaluate the organizational performance will be presented. Afterwards, an adequate concept for the registration of relevant aspects of organizational performance will be developed. DIFFERENT MEmODS TO REVEAL POTENTIALITIES FOR IMPROVEMENTSThe revelation of improvement potentialities is a major topic for every company, and therefore a wide range of methods have been developed. A feasable approach for their classification is the distinction of various sets of solutions which are systematically taken into consideration by these methods. In figure I the methods are divided into four classes "controlling", "branch A. Rolstadås (ed.), Benchmarking -Theory and Practice

The integrated simulation game for planning and reorganizing production systems has been developed at the ifab-institute in order to engage the awareness of the players for actual problems in real production systems. During the planning game the participants have to act on operative level as well as on strategic issues. First they have to plan and control the production of an existing assembly system for producing bicycles in planning teams. The system is modeled using the simulation tool FEMOS. Running the factory the teams are going to detect weak points inside the existing system. This experience is the basis for reorganizing the assembly system afterwards. The paper consists of demonstrating the principle structure of the planning game, the material used as well as an illustration of different planning results obtained by playing the game with students and professionals.

Abstract:During a project in the frame of the European Leonardo-da-Vinci-Programme five simulation games have been developed in order to engage awareness of the participants for problems in real production processes. The games focus on different areas of the production environment and are based on a common scenario: the optimisation and redesign of a bicycle production. The simulation games have been played by both industrial managers and students and could succeed in team oriented education. Additionally, the completion of a book describing the games and including software versions of the used simulation tools enables self-training in the field of production management. In this paper the common scenario of the simulation games will be presented. Two selected simulation games will be arranged according to a game classification scheme in order to characterize the games. The advantages and disadvantages of the two different kinds of learning methods -self-training and team oriented education-are also shown with the help of the classification scheme.