complexity

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.

Mastering high product variance and life cycle dynamics of demand can be an important competitive advantage in assembly. The main lever to this is a smart structuring of capacities and their assignment to assembly resources, such as lines, stations etc. The true benefit of this lever is hardly exploited due to poor support by established design methodologies. The article presents possible approaches to structure capacities in assembly and shows their exemplary use in practice.

Complexity will be characteristic for future economic and technological development. Highly integrated and customer-specific products, that are manufactured in short times and call for life-long services, pose demanding challenges for companies of all sizes. Life cycle orientation and product variety thus mean a new dimension of complexity for production management, knowledge engineering and general management. Consequently, in future it will not necessarily be the fastest, cheapest or technologically most advanced company, that will be most successful, but possibly the one that is able to cope with this growing complexity in the best way.

European companies which are producing on customers demand, have to face a highly turbulent competitive environment. The main challenges are short production cycles, high customer requirements, globalisation as well as competitors from developing countries. A solution to the resulting high dynamic and complexity are cooperative management approaches like supply chain management and the set up of specific flexibility potentials.