ERNE AG Holzbau currently plans the utilisation of its production resources and workforce through a manually maintained Excel spreadsheet. Relevant projects, milestone and resource data are distributed across different systems and must be manually implemented and adapted. This limits transparency and data consistency, while creating a high workload through manual adaptations and a strong dependency on individual experience and. This thesis explores the production planning process and how it could be developed into a more digital and automated solution.

A literature review of the current state of the art in timber construction is combined with a qualitative case study that includes an interview with production planning employees to map the current process and conduct a GAP analysis to identify the most significant discrepancies. The results provided the basis for the requirements catalogue, which was used to evaluate potential tools for the digitalisation of the process. 17 tools were evaluated in the first round. Four of these tools were then further evaluated and analysed: one internal, one standard and two custom-built solutions.

The findings of the GAP analysis show that industry best practices are identifiable but not fully implemented. The most significant discrepancy identified was the lack of full integration of the end-to-end process and data handling. The evaluation concluded that no standard solution on the market can fulfil ERNE AG Holzbau’s needs. The findings support three hypotheses: manual system integration hinders the planning process; fragmented, poorly structured data limits automation; and standard tools only partially meet the requirements. No ready-to-implement standard solution was identified. Ultimately, ERNE AG Holzbau should analyse and integrate the entire end-to-end process to identify an integrated solution, rather than viewing and digitalising the production process in isolation. Data handling and analysis should be optimised to improve the evaluation of current results and the accuracy of future predictions. If ERNE AG Holzbau wishes to integrate production planning separately, its ERP system offers the greatest integration potential but requires substantial internal resources. Two external solutions are proposed.