Open Access

Manufacturing companies are experiencing many challenges with regard to customer-oriented and on-time production, especially in the context of an intensified global business and while advancing the digital transformation. Accordingly, the ongoing development and deployment of Industry 4.0 solutions for customisable products in small batch sizes, not only pose new problems for work preparation, but also for operative production planning in connection with high cost, time and quality pressure. Modern, complex and highly automated production systems (in this case from the semiconductor domain) must be operated close to an optimal operating state in order to be economically reasonable. Promised delivery dates and throughput times specified in contracted service agreements must be ensured and require a permanent and effective adjustment of production planning and control in daily execution. All other general conditions of an economic production remain unchanged. Today, the question of whether the production target is realistic and whether all promised delivery dates are met are today still answered with rather simple backward-oriented approaches, mostly without taking into account uncertainties, stochastic behaviour of the manufacturing system or alternatives that arise during operation. As shown in previous publications, these questions can be answered in more detail and more resilient using a backward-oriented discrete event-based simulation approach (SimBack). This article presents additional findings. The results show and deepen the impression, that the SimBack-approach can be successfully solve scheduling questions for customer-specific orders in a real-world environment.

Die Automobilproduktion steht aktuell vor der Herausforderung, einen sich weiter diversifizierenden Antriebsmix effizient zu produzieren. Der vorliegende Beitrag erläutert die grundsätzlichen Einflüsse alternativer Antriebsarten auf die Fahrzeugproduktion, welche mithilfe umfangreicher Experteninterviews ermittelt wurden. Diese Erkenntnisse können genutzt werden, um langfristig die richtigen Produktionsstrategien für die Gestaltung effizienter Produktionsnetzwerke abzuleiten.

This article aims to identify the status quo of sustainability covenants firstly, secondly analyze their possibilities in enhancing sustainability performance and thirdly present further research directions. Covenants are additional contractual agreements mainly used in financial contracts, e.g. loans. They often focus on financial performance indicators, e.g., equity and net debt ratio, which the borrower must fulfil. However, the purpose of this article is to present a new approach to non-financial covenants, so-called sustainability covenants. Therefore, also nowadays ecological and social challenges are addressed. Banks have a huge impact on sustainable development by introducing more non-financial indicators in evaluating the creditability of borrowers. As a key hypothesis, this article argues that the approach of integrating ecological and social objectives through non-financial covenants is underrepresented in economic and business practice. Therefore, this article wants to examine how those objectives can be integrated into the financial concept of covenants and rely on research towards an integrative sustainability approach. In addition, a systematic literature review was conducted from October 2022 to July 2023 to analyze the status quo and derive future research directions. The review was based on two databases – Google Scholar and Scopus. As one key result, it was revealed that there is scarce existing literature on sustainability covenants, which refers to them as a policy measure. Only a few publications analyze their usage in financial contracts. However, this study implies the necessity for further research on sustainability covenants, emphasizing that they are powerful indicators to enhance the sustainability performance of the borrower.