Factory Planning Scrum: Integrative Factory Planning with Agile Project Management

Today, factory planning projects that include the planning of the production system and the industrial building are characterized by an increasing specialization of the planners, a rising interdisciplinarity, a high pressure on time and costs and a dynamic and turbulent environment. Existing planning procedures for production system and building planning describe the planning process as deterministic and divisible in discrete phases. Both planning processes run parallel; interfaces between architect, building services engineer and production system planner are insufficiently defined. The required coordination costs between the planning participants exceed an acceptable limit. Consequently, factory planning projects are oftentimes delayed, not within the planned budget or do not deliver a factory fulfilling the set targets, e.g. changeability, output or quality. Condition based factory planning (CBFP) is a modular approach for factory planning that can be reconfigured according to the specific project needs. The cross-linked planning modules create transparency on the dependencies between planning tasks. In this paper, an agile project management system is presented for condition based factory planning. It helps to synchronize the project team and to integrate the planning results during the planning process. In case of changes of the planning premises, the planning team is enabled to react quickly and to adapt the previously created planning results. The agile project management system is based on the known methodology scrum, however it also contains elements from classical project management adapted to the specific needs of factory planning. The paper starts with an analysis on the challenges in factory planning requiring a new project management system. In a second step, known project management approaches for factory planning are presented. Subsequently, an overview of the Factory Planning Scrum is given and all elements (e.g. roles, artifacts or sprints) are introduced.