1.1 Requirements for Tomorrow's Manufacturing

The classic factory has been defined by its manufacturing of goods. The goods and their value have been measured primarily by their material components. This is no longer adequate today. Increasing globalization is necessarily leading towards more anonymous products out of long supply chains and with an increasing complexity to track their origins. This implies a shifted focus from control of production creation (vertical integration) to control of product perception by the customer (OEM). Customers today take it for granted that products will be of first-class quality. Anyone wishing to stand out from the competition in the future needs a strategy which offers the customer an additional added value, such as, for example, high flexibility, short delivery times, high delivery reliability, wide range of variants, shorter product life cycles properties which are not created by production but by the processes. The term "adaptive manufacturing", which is heard more and more often these days, describes this approach as "connecting the machines to the markets."

For this reason many classic manufacturers today already define their production facilities as a service center, thereby signaling to the customer that they understand the processing of material into a finished product as also being a service for the customer. This increase in closeness to the customer initially results in cost increases. Modern producers attempt to cancel out these increased costs by rethinking their vertical integration, in some cases by using standard components or by sourcing suitable components on the global...