2025/01/01 by Demir, Mehmet, Schmidt, Matthias
Engineering · Business, Management and Accounting · #Flexible and Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems #Product Development and Customization #Advanced Manufacturing and Logistics Optimization
paper · doi:10.15488/20062
Manufacturing companies face pressure from shorter product life cycles, increasing product variety, and turbulent market dynamics, which amplify the need for rapid, coherent alignment of planning disciplines in factories. While mature, standardized procedures exist for sub-disciplines, such as factory planning, product planning, and spatial planning, their interfaces remain largely unspecified, leading to sequential iterations, and time delays. This paper argues that competitive factory systems require a synergistic planning methodology that integrates product, process, and space across strategic, tactical, and operational levels. The primary contribution of this paper is a conceptual framework that systematically synthesizes the established, yet disconnected, normative guidelines of product, factory and spatial planning. Building on general systems theory, the framework decomposes the overall planning system hierarchically, functionally, and structurally, thereby creating a coherent scaffold that makes the product-process-space causal chain methodologically actionable across disciplines. The approach operationalizes these insights as a foundation for a phase-oriented procedural model from coarse to fine, anchored in normative guidance, thereby establishing the necessary structural foundation for improved interface management in practice. By coupling product-induced requirements to process specifications and translating them into spatial solution spaces, the framework resolves the critical product–process–space linkage without bypassing necessary causal chains.