Wechselwirkung von langfristigen Kapazitätsentscheidungen auf ausgewählte Kennzahlen der Unternehmensperformance

Abstract

This master's thesis analyses the interactions between long-term capacity decisions and company performance. In dynamic market environments, flexibility in production is crucial to meet rapidly changing customer demands and market requirements. Long-term capacity decisions play a central role, as they not only require considerable investment but also take a long time to implement. If longterm capacity planning is not carried out in companies, bottlenecks can occur in production, which can have far-reaching effects on a company's performance. This master's thesis aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of the impact of these long-term capacity decisions on company performance, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. For this reason, the topics ‘long-term capacity decisions’, ‘company performance’ and the interactions between these two factors were analysed using appropriate scientific literature. The practical perspective was illustrated using a company case. A company from the automotive supply industry, ZF Steyr, is a suitable company to represent the practical perspective for this work. Both the long-term machine and personnel capacities of a production system and the company performance in various years were analysed. In this master's thesis, company performance was measured using the key figures profit margin, sales growth, return on assets (ROA), economic value added (EVA) and the balanced scorecard (BSC). The literature describes a positive and significant interaction between these key figures and in relation to company performance. For this outcome, articles that used qualitative or quantitative research methods were analysed in order to describe the interaction between long-term capacity decisions and company performance. The analysis of the company case shows that the positive effects of long-term capacity decisions, as described in the literature, are often covered by the volatile business environment and external environmental influences. As a result, the theoretically expected improvements in company performance are not always clearly demonstrable in practice. Consequently, the significant interaction described in the selected literature could not be confirmed in practice.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	German (Austria)
Supervisor	Klaus Altendorfer (Supervisor)