Philipp Pithan gives a talk at the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2024

On 22 October, Philipp Pithan, doctoral candidate at the chair of production management, gave a talk at the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2024 in Seattle, Washington.

In his talk, he presented the joint research with Prof. Dr. Huchzermeier on the variable takt. He illustrated the trends facing current production systems and why they are unable to cope with them. A fundamental system change to a variable takt is unavoidable. He proved that this is not only superior to the fixed takt, as it leads to higher utilization of existing resources and, therefore, ultimately to higher profitability. 

The variable takt is also insensitive to changes in the production plan and can produce individualized products with increased efficiency. The proposed approach completely eliminates sequence planning and significantly simplifies line balancing thanks to the “T-Bar” framework. Furthermore, the model presented, which includes modern assembly design elements such as “floaters”, “cycle modules”, “M1-matrices”, and Tesla’s “unboxed assembly”, can be used by production planners for more efficient resource planning.