volatility

The volatile world urges companies to react more agile to fast changes. Monitoring is a major building block for corporate agility. A lack of understanding of causal interrelations between a multitude of volatility drivers demands a new monitoring approach. Big data is presented as an adequate tool and its agility support is discussed from a data and analytics point of view. Conclusively, guidelines for developing a monitoring system are discussed.

Increasing market volatility and uncertainty require manufacturing companies to adapt their operations model to a substantially changing environment. The orientation towards agility can be seen as a key to success in such a situation. To achieve agility for an organization it is necessary to address four distinct dimensions of agility. A company oriented towards lean production tries to optimize one variable at a time. However, to become agile it is required to address two variables simultaneously. This article outlines current challenges for industrial organizations and points out possible solutions.

The concern of an interdisciplinary research project called Dynamo PLV from institutes of the TU Darmstadt and the European Business School is to combine the three topics production, logistics and traffic and merge them together. Goal of the project is to generate holistic approaches to resolve disciplinary boundaries. Integrated value adding networks which can already be located in the automotive industry will have strong effects on competitiveness of industrial locations in the future. This calls for an overlapping consideration of the systems production, logistics and traffic. Aim of this paper is to show and identify the differing interests and conflicts between the actors of a value adding network from the automotive industry. Conflicting goals between multi-layers like intra-company areas (logistics and procurement) or areas along the supply chain (supplier and OEM) or beyond the supply chain (companies and public authorities) prevent optimal resource use and reduce ...