automotive industry

The necessary work steps for the development of an automotive are distributed more and more across boarders of divisions, locations and enterprises. Both the technical complexity of products and the organizational complexity regarding the degree of integration are increasing. In order to understand, plan, logically map, and successfully manage the very complex product structure and the highly networked product development-process, commonly accepted structure or process models are used. The creation of these models can be supported by reference-models. In this article a field tested approach for modelling reference-process-models and application of different reference models in a multi-level-model will be shown.

The dynamic business environment is a logistical challenge for the automotive industry. Original Equipment Manufacturers, suppliers and logistics service providers are dealing within a complex network, which makes adjustments of a single company still essential, but stresses the necessity of optimised cooperation in the automotive industry for efficient reaction. The main questions for the members of ForLog are to which situations with an impact on the logistics system players in the automotive network have to adjust and how important these situations are for each single player.

The article gives an overview about the results of the “Automotive Survey 2005” which was commissioned by IDS Scheer Germany and carried out by the Institute for Information Systems (IWi) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). The survey focuses on innovations in the automotive industry, in particular the automotive supplier industry. This article concentrates on business process innovations and their relation to cross-organisational co-operation. The current situation as well as a prospect of its development towards c-business is given at the end of the article.

The complexity of today’s products and the resulting complexity of business and manufacturing processes are already very high. Product complexity will increase because of the growing number of engine and car body variants. The possibilities to choose and to combine extra options will increase as well. In order to identify potentials for optimisation and to evaluate new concepts of cooperation and collaboration in multi-tier intra- and inter-company supply chains, these processes have to be modeled and described according to requirements of the automotive industry. The Supply Chain Operations Reference-Model (SCOR-Model) is an instrument to develop a simple and flexible methodology to model structures of supply chains and to scale realistic logistics processes.