performance

The evidence of the ecological sustainability of logistics systems is increasingly expected by customers inside and outside the supply chain. Companies can affect their carbon footprint at different strategic levels: products, structures, processes and technologies. The potential use and evaluation of technologies and their contribution to improve ecological sustainability while taking into account economic conditions are the subject of this paper.

The migration of production sites out of Europe is primarily based on manufacturing costs. Therefore, perfectly functioning communication systems and reliable logistic services are needed. Although the advantage of lower labor costs will decrease in the future, more low-wage countries will be discovered. The answer cannot be found in low-cost production but in an approach which optimizes processes in a holistic way avoiding waste through intelligent solutions.

Industrial customers are increasingly expecting to be provided with integrated solutions that in addition to a decent physical product comprise diverse services as well. Such solutions, called product-service systems (PSS), have to fulfil both customer individual targets and manufacturer targets. Due to this, manufacturer have to define key figures, which allow to choose the specific configuration of PSS and to measure the performance while it is used. This paper presents an approach for generating key figures for selecting PSS and controlling their performance.