Leadership

The intensive international competition exerts strong cost pressure on Germany’s producing companies. Hence, managers more and more decide to relocate industrial locations to foreign countries in order to reduce their costs. However, not all possibilities to strengthen and to sustainably save Germany’s industrial locations have been tapped, yet. One step towards this that is supposed by companies to keep a high potential, is to collaborate. A new approach for the design of collaborations focussing complexity drivers shall raise the probability of success of collaborative goods and services.

Many companies have difficulties managing the recent situation of competition. Some companies achieve only small cost savings through the use of rationalization strategies. Network cooperations, however, offer many possibilities to successfully take advantage of efficiency increasing synergy effects. All participating companies can concentrate harder on their core business and achieve other features in cooperation with partner companies. This development concerns major enterprises as well as medium-sized businesses. While Outsourcing can be seen as a routine job for major enterprises, it poses problems for medium-sized businesses. These companies are lacking the necessary experience as well as tools to evaluate Outsourcing. This contribution points out the problems, that are related to Outsourcing in medium-sized businesses and demonstrates solutions.

For practitioners and researchers in the field of organizational networks virtual structures are of paramount importance. However the issue of purity of these virtual structures has not been sufficiently dealt with. The dissemination of hybrid forms of learning („blended learning“), of distribution („brick & click“) and work (“split location work”) signals that virtual organizational structures are also based on a hybrid design. This article outlines the variety of architectures of such semi-virtual structures as well as the challenges related to their implementation.

Industrial companies as well as small and medium sized enterprises engage themselves more and more in international production networks. Each networkpartner aims on building and maintaining business relationships to the best partner for any specific task. This leads to an increasing amount of goods being transported from partner to partner and leads to an immense logistics effort. These logistics tasks are responsible for major cost blocks in most companies. Organisations will have to react to the increasing demand for on time delivery with organisational as well as technological solutions to maintain their competitive advantage.

High dynamics and structural complexity in current and future logistic systems are complicating central planning and control. For enabling a more decentralised and autonomous control, communication between the elements of the logistical network are necessary for the provisioning of the information needed. This article details the modelling of the communication between the components. This modelling contains source and sink of the information as well as the amount of data, frequency of transmission, quality of service and the moment of transmission for a reasonable usage of the information. The technical feasibility with current and upcoming communication systems is evaluated under consideration of the model.

Due to increasing pressure of competition accompanied with the developments in information technology many companies consider speeding up and improving their business processes with regard to major orientation towards their customers. Employees which are involved in these business processes have to be supported by an improved and tailored information supply. One possibility for this support by new Information Compative Technologies (ITC) will be shown in this article on the basis of an example for a customer complaint process.

The emergence of internet technologies has led to a fundamental transformation of value chains. For logistics service providers in particular new revenue sources and new roles in supply chains evolve. E-logistics helps to reduce the transaction costs in supply chains and hence increases the willingness for outsourcing. The ability to integrate seamlessly into customer processes, which can be referred to as collaboration capability, is a central competitive factor in the outsourcing industry. Also in this area e-logistics plays the role of an innovation driver. This article discusses the potentials and barriers of e-logistics initiatives and collaboration for logistics service providers and their customers and structures the design parameters of collaboration through a methodology.

One main impetus for the participation of enterprises in cooperations can be characterized by the e-business phenomenon. Increased supplier demands concerning flexibility, costs, and quality require a flexible potential to participate in constantly new cooperations. The model concept illustrated in this article is supposed to support the mutability of enterprises by use of intermediary services between cooperating units that are suitable to aid the partnership.

In order to meet rising and fast changing requirements companies have to reconfigure their production systems in ever shorter periods. The temporary character of production systems, the rise of complexity as well as a rising number of intra- and inter-organizational cooperation are the logical results of this development. Managing the production as a project is an innovative and promising concept for coping with the resulting challenges. This article introduces the concept of a Project-oriented Production and describes a way for the cooperative planning and designing of modular production systems within 3D planning rooms.