Industry 4.0 describes the fourth industrial revolution, which leads to an intelligent, connected and decentralized production. A core aspect is a continuous communication between humans, machines and products during the production process enabled by cyber physical production systems (CPPS). The overall aim is to increase cost- and time-efficiency, and improve product quality, which requires a broad understanding of the enabling technologies as well as methods and tools. Within this paper, one production process (spring coiling) with three different involved value adding companies is analyzed to identify quality related production issues that shall be addressed with an intelligent condition monitoring based quality control system. The research addresses both machine related and organizational process analysis. Therefore, a comprehensive descriptive model has been developed to represent the relevant systems, their interfaces, interdependencies and influence parameters. This paper presents the procedure to develop the descriptive model, including other generated documents to define the system of objectives incorporating the technical and the value adding partners’ requirements

Divergent customer requirements demand a product portfolio, which needs to be strategically coordinated. Furthermore, products are developed in generations. Thus, a coordination of the different generations is needed. For a successful support, process models can be used. The integrated-Product-engineering-Model (iPeM) is an integrated approach, which aims to fill in the gap between process management and engineering design. Building on an empirical study of the use of the iPeM in the last 10 years, the iPeM has been modified. This includes an adaption of the activities and an extension from the second to the third dimension. There are four different layers added: product generations, strategy as well as production- and validation system. The adapted model allows inductively refining the theory and deductively creating of boundary conditions for the research on product development

Samsung recently introduced a new smartphone display with increased breaking resistance, which will probably be relevant for future cars as well. This example shows that subsystems, in general artefacts from former development processes can be relevant for subsequent projects. Their integration has to be planned, i.a. even before the original product is in the market and across branches. The research on supporting methods requires a suitable description model for this phenomenon. Research in design reuse and PGE – product generation engineering addresses this only partially yet. Design reuse focuses on the informational aspect, PGE refers primarily to reference products. This contribution aims at closing this gap as a basis for future research. Two case studies from industry projects by the authors and an example from foresight and product planning show the role of artefacts from former development processes in running projects. It is described which artefacts are used as a reference, why they are used and when. Based on these findings the authors propose the term “reference system” to depict the whole set of artefacts, which serves as a basis for every product development project.