supply chains

Supply management provides an organization with the resources that it needs but does not produce itself. However, intraorganizational needs are not isolated. They ultimately serve to fulfill the demands of external (end) customers. Traditionally, supply management receives information from its internal customers, i.e. from other functional areas such as production planning, logistics, or marketing. Information on (end) customer demands reaches supply management, if at all, indirectly via these other functional areas, which often pass on information after interpreting it. This article discusses how digital twins of (end) customer demands can provide all functional areas with precise, near-real-time data.

More than 99% of German companies are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which therefore represent an important part of industrial supply chains. New regulations are increasing the pressure on companies to create transparency along the supply chain so that the role of SMEs is also coming into focus. However, they are often confronted with limited financial and human resources. Based on a quantitative survey and a literature review, this article deals with the question of what SME-friendly approaches could look like.

Brazil offers great potential, e.g. for the automotive industry. However procurement, production and distribution structures often lead to specific challenges. To cope with these challenges tested logistic planning approaches can be transferred. This article describes the cooperation between the Fraunhofer IML, Germany, and various Brazilian partners to initiate such a knowledge transfer and to adopt supply chain planning methods for the Brazilian automotive industry.

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.