complexity management

Customer orientation and individualization will be two of the biggest challenges for companies. They need to expect their business model to become more complex as the range and diversity of their products and services will increase. Those who find a smart approach of managing the complexity will have a decisive competitive advantage. Those who use modularization across products, services, production and the organisation, will be prepared to deliver individual value propositions more quickly and their profitability will not be jeopardised by their own complexity.

The increasing product variety and complexity is a problem which, more or less pronounced, applies almost every company. The output quantity remains below the actual level, the effort in the quotation and order processing is higher than necessary, and the customer satisfaction with the delivery reliability could be better. Intuitively, these companies often know why that is. The complexity of processes and changing bottlenecks hide the view of the solution. To counteract this, all business areas are looking for intelligent and effective methods. The hurdle is to meet customer requirements without increasing the internal complexity and costs, to act lean, flexible and value-oriented.

The increasing complexity in manufacturing companies’ business environment requires the fast response to changes with little effort. The article focuses the design and implementation of a changeable and versatile production system that transfers the well-proven tact-oriented principle to the whole order management process. The realization is illustrated by practical examples.

Today the appropriate handling of complexity is a vital competitive factor for manufacturing firms. An effective complexity management must not only focus on the optimisation of the product architecture but has also to consider the interdependences between the product architecture, the development organisation and the development process. The coherent design of these three domains in the context of complexity management is the topic of this article.

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.

Decisions regarding strategic flexibility are qualitative and complex. This article introduces an attempt to operationalize the construct of strategic flexibility. As a decision support tool for strategic flexibility management - a management of intentional change, it will be developed a qualitative performance-measurement-system. This tool will provide the user a deeper knowledge of relevant design parameters of strategic flexibility and their relations.

petition demand new strategies in the management of an increasing complexity. Modularization of complex systems is such a strategy, practical for products and processes. However, the planning of modular structures takes place at an early stage of product development and is associated with many risks. Because of this, changes in products and processes are inevitable. Therefore, the design of an alterable module structure and effective management of module changes is the focus of the following article.

The increasing complexity in products, structures and processes causes a creeping reduction of the efficiency of intra- and inter-organisational business pro-cesses. Since not all parts of complexity can be influenced by the managerial work, the controlling of the other parts by efficient processes is an important aspect. Business process modularisation allows identifying process parts with clearly defined interfaces, which mainly reduce the complexity of these pro-cesses.

The individualization in demand has led to an enormous increase in the complexity of products and processes in internal company practice. That is why the management of complexity is one of the main company targets, especially in the automotive industry. With an Integrated Process and Data Model (IPDM) current business processes can be completely illustrated by a new documentation method called documentation of interconnections. The method of valued change management makes it possible to optimise the model gradually concerning the complexity of products and processes. Therefore, the strategically foundation for an extensive and process accompanying management of complexity is laid.

Profilerating product complexity has numerous reasons and consequences for the whole enterprise. Often these are unknown. The management of product complexity addresses neither the unifold maximization nor the minimization of product diversity. Managing product complexity, i. e. product range, product sequence and product assembly, means to achieve an optimum where high cus-tomer value can be reached whilst maintaining comparatively low cost of production. The VMEA method (Variant Mode and Effects Analysis) is designed and proven for the optimization of both the product assembly and the product functions. It facilitates a systematic and consequent approach to managing product complexity. Thus product complexity can be used as strategic success position and competitive advantage.