Autor: Sven Kuhn

Product piracy has risen to a serious problem for almost every OEM in the capital goods industry. Identifying the right counter-measures for creating and optimizing a holistic anti-counterfeiting-strategy helps to cope with these challenges. One of the most critical factors in developing such a strategy is establishing a cost/benefit ratio. A three-level selection concept helps choosing the right measures.

Companies have to determine which real net output ratio is the best for them. In such a case a company must decide which combination of product components and processes should be produced internal or external. There are no methods available to analyze the benefits of an internal or external manufacturing for products with high variety. However, due to the increasing number of variants and the low real net output ratio this question becomes more and more important. Therefore this article will introduce a method capable to support the make or buy decision for products with high variety.

Transparency concerning direct and indirect costs that occur per product variant within the entire supply network is vital for the successful management of high product diversity. The introduction of variant classes and core processes is a promising approach to achieve transparency of costs for each company as well as for the supply network. By means of activity-based costing, the variant costs can be calculated and subsequently analyzed in order to realize an improved planning of product design, business processes and supply network.

Although medium sized enterprises ascribe high importance to knowledge management and its impact on company’s success, they have rarely undertaken steps to introduce respective methods. Only a small share of companies applies selected methods, usually rather sporadic and without connection to corporate strategy or other management techniques. The reason lies in the lack of a tool for choosing the most suitable methods. Out of the multitude of instruments available for knowledge management, it is difficult to decide about a method mix fitting best to respective business processes, initial situation and specific demands of the company. This paper presents a concept to manage these shortcomings.