10. More Deterministic Product Ramp-up in Cloud Manufacturing Scenarios

Production environment as envisioned by the Industry 4.0 initiative will perform a transition from product manufacturers to manufacturing service providers (cloud manufacturing). This transition will increase the number of simultaneous ramp-up phases in factories significantly. However, even today’s factories struggle to master ramping up of new products with respect to planned costs, duration (time-to-volume) and achieved initial quality. The paper describes an approach based on information technology, which determines reusable semi-finished products or process segments out of historical data of a factory. Consequently the approach covers how information has to be organized within and beyond the scope of a single factory, and how the specification of a new product is semi-automatically converted into a pre-qualified production plan of the product in a specific factory. Accordingly the described approach will help to master ramp-up phases in current factories and be the basis to master future challenges for manufacturing service providers.