Prof. Dr. Diethard Bergers | Production Technology and Product Development
Personal Details
Professor Bergers represents the Department of Production Technology und Product Development at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Born in Düsseldorf in 1951, he studied Physics and Mathematics at the University of Cologne and received his doctor's degree at the Aerodynamic Department, within the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at RWTH Aachen (Technical University) in 1982. From 1985 until 1990 he was assistant at the 'Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung', first within the support program, and later as the personal assistent to Prof. Dr. Berthold Beitz. In 1990, he moved to the central research and development unit of the Krupp company and was appointed as the managing director in 1992. In 1994, he took on the management of the central business unit technology in the board of directors, until 1998, when he moved to the University Essen.
Teaching
The Department provides teaching in the field of product and production planning. The main topics include integrated processes and product design, including value creation.
Production enterprises can be seen as systems consisting of production factors (man, machine, material). The lectures outline all the process steps, from the choice of the product program, the design of work plans/processes, the management and the implementation of Production Planning and Control (PPC) with their strategies.
Knowledge about material flow management and other influencing variables are indispensable requirements. Students learn how production processes are involved in the value added chain.
Research
The progression of globalization forces today’s companies to stand up against international business competitors. The challenge is to defend Germany as a worthwhile business location. Enterprises involved in production see themselves exposed to the rising pressures of costs, which force them to optimize their own products and processes, by constantly trying increase productivity. Thus a main area of today’s business is to shorten the existing lead times of production processes and related areas, in order to increase output performance. The speed of processes becomes a crucial factor for enterprises. In order to accelerate the processes, enterprises increasingly have to focus more on the integration of computer-assisted planning and optimization tools for the processes in production.
The professorship of Production Technology and Product Development is busy with the optimization of such technical business processes using process simulation. Using the example of a manufacturing line there is the modeling, the simulation and the actual optimization. The step of optimization is not restricted to only structural changes of the manufacturing line, such as layout adaptions. Moreover, the objective is to integrate the process strategies to increase output performance.