Production means constantly finding yourself in areas of tension, between day-to-day operations – represented by quality, delivery and costs – on the one hand, and continuous improvement – represented by stability, flexibility and innovation – on the other.

Batch size One at sinking revenue or standardisation versus individualisation are just two typical examples of day-to-day issues in production.

The bad news is that there is no miracle cure to resolve these tensions. The good news is that agreeing, communicating and consistently respecting priorities greatly helps day-to-day production.

Mastering the challenges of production requires optimising highly complex practicalities and organisation, along with constant external communication and agreement. Principal elements here are sales, business development, procurement, engineering, and product and technological development. Other areas that sustainably shape production in the long term are product management, industrialising, lean production management, and research and development.

Based on our holistic understanding, we look at topics such as production costs, delivery time, delivery reliability and production quality. Alongside these issues we look at business environments, which significantly influence the areas of tension in production. Working with these environments and their influence on the typical production performance parameters is actually fundamental to effectively building Industry 4.0 from the ground up.