Production Progression System

The player should be able to enhance and improve the different stages of production in order to create better, cheaper or target group focused products.

With a slow and static improvement of his process and products he can use this system to beat other companies at the market

Every stage can be enhanced in a static way by investing money in new infrastructure besides maintenance. Every one of them has additionally some slots for "work groups" (?...insert fancy name here). Those work groups can add significant bonuses to the steps like impact on the environment, output of a factory, maintenance costs, quality, fame, ...

This should symbolize the importance of the right staff in your company. They are however only a resource on the meta level but can still make a significant difference

Those work groups are interchangeable and can be moved and placed anywhere at any time in your company. There is some adaption penalty however. (To make it more positive we can add here a bonus for staying at the same place for a certain time).

The player should feel to have a broad set of choices where he wants to improve his production line with this limited resources

Progression of the individual work groups

The individual work groups have a certain number assigned to them which indicates how much bonuses they give to the steps. This number indicates the power of the work group in their skill level. This value can be improved slowly by practice (being assigned to a production facility) or rather fast by putting the work group in research. However if the group is in research it can not add its bonus to a facility.

This system makes sure that sitting on a lot of knowledge in work groups for a long time does not pay off because the knowledge will not increase (~simulates the perishability of knowledge in the real world). Furthermore the user has to decide if he wants to invest in a long term manner by putting work groups in research which cost money now but will pay off later. The other possibility is to use their skills right away without any research tasks which will result in a disadvantage in the mid - long term.

Work group duplication

Every work group can also be used to duplicate itself but training new work groups. Depending on the level of power the work group has it can train a new group to a certain power level. A example would be a group with power M could train a new group in N time to a power level of M/2. For M2/3 it needs 2N and so on. It is easy to train a new group to a basic understanding of the topic.

Again this simulates the perishability of knowledge. The player can really fast create low qualified work groups which he can use the boost his whole production line. This will result in a early spike but he has severe problems in the long run with this tactics. The other extreme would be to invest a lot of time in research for a single group until very late into the game. This will be really weak in the early game, however it will give a massive spike in the late game because he can easily get additional work groups to a very high power level

Work group combination

Not sure about this one but it could add additional depth: The player can combine 2 work groups to form a mixed work group (agile team :D). The resulting work group has both perks of the original in a debuffed version. Depending on the combination the perks can influence each other in a positive or negative way.

This would give the player the possibility to add more perks to one production step than work group slots. He can decide if it is worth it to sacrifice the ability to place both full power groups for combining weaker versions of both in one slot

Work group market

There is a market for work groups where companies can trade, buy or sell groups with/from/to each other.