Determinants of Ramp-up Management in Battery cell Factories

In recent years, the number of announced battery cell gigafactories in Europe is increasing with a rapid pace. Both new entrants and incumbent firms are among the players who are planning and discussing their high outputs of Lithium-Ion battery cells in the near future. However, either the copy exactly strategy or the factory blueprints from the new entrants are facing enormous challenges on European soil, especially with regards to the ramp-up management of the gigafactories. Therefore, an analysis of other industries and case studies like hard disk drives, automobiles and others are studied and the findings are then transferred on the lithium-ion bat-tery cell production process. For example, simple changes in the mixing process can cause disturbances in the production processes in late stages and, thus, need to be anticipated as early as possible. Therefore, an integrated product and process development is inevitable for a successful ramp-up of lithium-ion gigafactories. Anoth-er important factor is the knowledge management and training of new and existing employees, whereas the latter need to be engaged in the transformation process to actively participate in the transformation towards green and sustainable battery technologies and their production processes.

For this, several determinants are extinguished from literature and case studies as-sociated to ramp-up management and will form the basis for a new and unique case study on ramp-up management of lithium-ion battery cell factories.