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04/12/2019 | Berichte aus den Bereichen

Industry partners sought for traceability research project

In large companies, traceability systems are used for the complete traceability of products along their value creation process. With the aid of various technical solutions, these systems make it possible to assign defects directly and unambiguously to the manufacturing and/or processing operations that caused them. In small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), however, traceability systems are still not widespread. Cooperation partners from industry are now being sought for a research project in this area.

In order to create an awareness of the necessity of traceability solutions for securing one's own competitiveness, the departments of Quality and Process Management (Prof. Robert Refflinghaus) and Production Organization and Factory Planning (Prof. Sigrid Wenzel) at the University of Kassel are pursuing the goal in their research project of showing SMEs in particular the advantages of traceability solutions on a case-by-case basis. Using a methodology specially tailored to SMEs and taking SME-specific restrictions into account, they want to provide support in selecting and procuring a traceability system that is suitable for the company in question.

The innovative core element of this two-year research project, which has already been approved by the German Federation of Industrial Research Associations "Otto von Guericke" e.V. (AiF), is the development of generally applicable catalogs of criteria and evaluation matrices that make it possible to evaluate various traceability concepts available on the market with a minimum of effort in terms of their suitability for one's own company. The results of the analysis are then prototypically implemented and evaluated in an intuitive Excel-based software demonstrator. By using the demonstrator, SMEs, which often have only limited personnel and financial resources, are enabled for the first time to carry out a needs-oriented, company-specific design of all essential components of a traceability system in one work step, across concepts, with little effort and without detailed methodological knowledge, and to implement the system in their own company.

Are you interested in the topic addressed and would you like to exchange information with other companies within the framework of the project or participate as an application partner? The project team members Tim Trostmann and Christian Kern look forward to hearing from you and will be happy to explain the possibilities for participation.

Contact: Phone: 0561 804 4657; e-mail: trostmann[at]uni-kassel[dot]de,kern[at]uni-kassel[dot]de