AITPL
From AMI@Work Communities Wiki
The strength of the European Economy is substantially based on relationships among many enterprises, which together form agile networks, able to react to market demands in shortest time. These networks (sometimes formalized as virtual enterprise for a specific product) are still competing successfully on a worldwide scale with enterprises from distant countries which offer wages in completely different dimensions. This success can be kept, only, if the networks establish and maintain smooth communications which cover the complete life cycle of the product. Significant effort has been spent to synchronize the product development in such networks. However, the same exertion is indispensable to improve the manufacturing chain itself, providing means for a radical make-to-order strategy. This includes substantial new methods for product configuration, for supply network management, for the control of the supply network material capability (in contrary to the capability to deliver of single companies) as well as for propagating forecast for new model variants and carefully monitoring the time-to-empty of the supply chain for the variants going out of production. The importance of these aspects can not be overestimated, as the closeness to the market (changing from years to days) requests for highly frequent changes. Changes are either general (for the model, due to improvements, new features responding to the more and more sophisticated customer demands or fault elimination) or directly customer-driven (configuring the specific delivered product). In both cases, even if changes may be minor, they can have implications on many supply networks nodes. Managing this information is, therefore, a major challenge for the near future. While the challenge is to the network, the reaction to the challenge has to be performed by the companies as the only real actors. This addresses the need of acting locally in the network environment, thus driving the network’s success globally. The keyword is context awareness, providing means to effectively manage decisions of different network partners for different product and production status. Different environments within one system should adapt to the roles of the human being addressing the network, and different (possibly conflicting) changes need to be detected and introduced into the workflow for problem solving. Such systems would behave different dependent from where they are contacted (in the extreme case, changing the role when physical interfaces like PDAs are moved into a new environment). Also, product-oriented information technology (“internet of things”) will enable completely new means of communication and control. Today, Europe’s attitude with respect to agility is massively higher than from distant low-cost / high volume providers. However, achieving the goals mentioned requires a new step forward in terms of the business culture.
