Proactive Management of Production Technologies: A Conceptual Framework

To gain competitive advantages within the growing challenges of the dynamic market environment producing companies must be agile, anticipative and adaptive. Current and future manufacturing requirements need to be fulfilled in the best manner. Consequently, the appropriateness of the applied production technologies has to be analyzed continuously. In order to identify technological need for action timely the interdependencies of temporally and structurally recurring patterns (defined as cycles) within the production environment have to be contemplated. Modeling and analyzing these cycles (e.g. technology lifecycle, manufacturing resource lifecycle) facilitates a proactive planning and an evaluation approach of production technologies. Therefore, this paper presents a conceptual framework supporting the timely adequate identification and evaluation of alternative production technologies to enhance the performance of producing companies.