Towards a Change-Specific and Company-Individual Manufacturing Change Management

Manufacturing companies are challenged by various influencing factors in the volatile environment, which requires frequent adjustments to their factories, known as Manufacturing Changes (MCs). The wide variety of changes and the company-individual implementation of Manufacturing Change Management (MCM) processes in practice represent a significant challenge for research, as general approaches are often too rigid and cannot be adequately integrated into the individual structures of companies. Existing MCM processes in the industry often lack flexibility, methodological, and digital support. This contribution proposes a change-specific and company-individual approach to address these challenges. The four-step methodology includes steps for describing MCM processes, creating a systematic change description model, identifying and structuring methods and digital tools, and correlating attributes through a Delphi study. An overall application methodology supports companies in using the methodology and serves as a basis for the final validation.