Business Models

The creation and configuration of innovative business models within the sheet metal forming industry focuses on the development of saleable product-service-combinations. It is necessary to integrate these product-service-combinations in adequate value chain configurations. To charge the output of the product-service-combinations appropriate revenue models must be selected and configured. This article shows an integrative methodology for redesigning existing and creating new business models.

Latest publications in journals and newspapers tend to draw a cheerless future for companies producing in Western Europe. This is reason enough to analyze the companies still competing successfully in high cost countries. What kinds of success factors have these companies in common? Based on a benchmarking project, 48 companies have been identified, which, in comparison to their competitors, stand out with a superior development of their market share, sales and margin. Out of these, the four most successful companies have been chosen to gain a better understanding of the success factors of producing in high cost countries.

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.

A new business model, conceived by WZL of the University of Aachen, bases on Open Source development and advances Outsourcing. Commercial Open Source Development (COSD) has the capability to break open the area of conflict between customer orientation, individualisation, product design costs and error probability by embedding the customer systematically and lucratively into product development. Two trends of product design support COSD: Functions of technical products can be increasingly affected through Software solutions; Open Source principals have reached a high level of maturity.

Today the developments within the area of mobile business and mobile commerce influence marketing, sales and maintenance of products and services to a high degree. On the other hand mobile technologies offer new possibilities like: personalisation, localisation, interactivity, ubiquity, comfort of transactions and emotionalisation. But how can these new applications of mobile business be supported in order to structure a company’s internal processes in a more effective and efficient way as well as to increase the customers’ acceptance and customer orientation? A promising possibility is the usage of innovative mobile devices and the investment in new technologies, e.g. Augmented Reality, to meet these demands.

During the last 20 years the computer motivated a drastic change for the office work and by embedded systems controlling the shop floor. However in the daily work paper is sometimes still the only medium supporting work processes in production and maintenance in information provision and gathering. Often more than 50 % of the process time are just caused by the production and handling of those papers. Wearable Computing solutions now offer a possibility to obtain information on the move - unobtrusively supporting the primary tasks by information provision and collection. The introduction of the technology requires sufficient user acceptance. Only when this user acceptance is given the encountered potentials improving quality and productivity can be realised.

Due to its strategic importance, the performance of Research & Development (R&D) has to be analyzed on a detailed level when evaluating a company in the context of a possible takeover. The main question concerns the set-up and the risks of the R&D programme. In addition to current R&D projects, planned R&D activities have to be taken into account. In the context of a R&D Due Diligence many different areas of analysis have to be handled and evaluated to receive a meaningful result for the evaluation of the company.

The essential challenge for successful companies is to meet all requirements of global market. In order to adapt to these markets, the companies would have to expand by reducing its delivery times, producing an excellent quality and offering competitive prices and high flexibility. To fulfil this task, the controlling of the manufacture production should combine the requirements of markets with the factors of production in the company. This essay describes a systematic and methodical way to establish a leading shareholder value management system.

globalization, production network, global supply chain, key success factors for global competition

“The Digital Factory is no longer a vision, but on the way to reality“, Volkswagen reported on the branch meeting in Ludwigsburg in June 2004. This quote reflects the situation of the Digital Factory in automotive industry in an impressing way. Other branches and enterprise sizes still have to accomplish this step, as an actual study of Fraunhofer IPA shows. Here the question arises how enterprises handle the subject “Introduction of the Digital Factory”. To say it directly - there is no general approach. Depending on the structure of customers and suppliers, the size of enterprise and on the product, individual approaches have to be found and implemented. But what can be pointed out independent of the specific enterprise are the success factors for the introduction of the Digital Factory. This subject is dealt with in the article at hand.