Refine
Document Type
- Part of a Book (1)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Language
- English (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- configuration (3) (remove)
Institute
A company can choose between three generic competitive strategies. Alongside the strategy of cost leadership are the strategy of differentiation and the strategy of focussing on niches, although we will not be discussing this latter any further here. The strategy of cost leadership is based on the achievement of “economies of scale”, so generating advantage from the benefits of cost reduction, learning curve effects and automation. In the strategy of differentiation the focus is on “economies of scope” which enable the customer-specific products to be offered, but this is generally achieved only with an increase in the complexity of products and processes. In the past it was assumed that these two strategies were mutually exclusive, as an increase in the economies of scale basically leads to a reduction in the economies of scope, and vice versa. But in order to survive in the international competitive arena companies in the high-wage countries need increasingly to offer individually tailored products at competitive prices. The target to be aimed at is therefore customer-specific products at the cost of mass production, so resolving the dilemma between economies of scale and economies of scope. For this it is necessary to optimise the alignment of all the structural elements in both the product and its production, because of the high level of their interdependence.
The areas on which we will focus our review and designs in the following will be what are known as product-production systems, or more briefly, production systems. This topic includes not only the resources and processes of the value creation systems, but also the products produced and offered on the market by a company as one connected entity. In order to tackle the challenges mentioned above, it is necessary to make it possible to measure and compare the current position of any given production system on the see-saw between economies of scale and economies of scope, and then be able to redesign specific facets of them as a second phase. A method of integrative evaluation and design of production systems is presented below for this purpose.
The complexity and volatility of companies’ environment increase the relevance of disruption preparation. Resilience enables companies to deal with disruptions, reduce their impact and ensure competitiveness. Especially in the context of procurement, disruptions can cause major challenges while resilience contributes to ensuring material availability. Even though past disruptions have posed various challenges and companies have recognized the need to increase resilience, resilience is often not designed systematically. One major challenge is the number of potential measures to increase resilience. The systematic design of resilience thus requires a detailed understanding of domain-specific measures. This also includes an understanding of the contribution of these measures to different resilience components and their interdependencies. This paper proposes a systematic approach for configuring resilience in procurement which enables the evaluation and selection of resilience measures. Based on a resilience framework, a resilience configurator is developed. The basis of the configurator are resilience potentials that have been characterized and clustered. Overarching approaches to design resilience and indicators to evaluate resilience are presented. Moreover, a procedure is proposed to ensure practical applicability. To evaluate the results two case studies are conducted. The results enable companies to systematically design their resilience in procurement.
Conventional approaches lead to inflexible organization:
Classic optimization approaches consider only the fully standardized formal
processes and disregard knowledge intensive and informal ones. Similarly, the
information systems considered are rigid and meant to support only the formal processes. As a consequence of over standardisation in both processes and information technology, the organizations become resistant to any change in operations. This inflexibility leads to delays in adapting their services and product to match the volatile and dynamic market needs.
Contemporary processes and IT allow flexibility:
Currently, organizations are forced to diverge from classic and narrow approaches,
and explore new alternative means to enable human-centric knowledge
processes and collaborative information technologies. These 'Collaborative technologies'
are considered to support a much larger spectrum of process types
namely formal as well as semi-formal and informal processes.
Lack of approaches to configure processes and IT:
Even knowing the potentials of collaborative technologies, the organizations still
show a very slow inclusion into their daily operations, and with relatively high
failure rate. This is due to the fact that there are no comprehensive approaches
or methods available to systematically identify, organize and map organizational
process types to the available collaborative technologies.
Model to configure knowledge processes and IT applications:
The aim of this dissertation is to provide organizations with a model and an
application approach to configure their knowledge intensive processes with the
functionalities offered by collaborative technologies. The model is structured
into three main segments:
• description of attributes of knowledge intensive processes
• description of functionalities of collaborative technologies
• configurations of knowledge intensive processes and collaborative
technologies
The model enables the organizations to recognise and configure knowledge
intensive processes with their collaborative technologies. The model and scenarios
are applicable within organizational settings supported by an application
approach and tool based concept. The model is applied and validated within
three diverse industrial case studies.