18th ICPR plenary paper: Intelligent Production - Competition Strategies for Producing Enterprises

H J Bullinger (1) , Wolfgang Schweizer (2)

1 Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft - Fraunhofer
2 Industrial Engineering

Producing enterprises in Europe were in a situation, which marks itself by a strong growth of competition and an individualizing of the customer's requests increasing at the same time. In order to maintain the market, many enterprises with mass production find in front of the difficult task of linking two strategic options: the simultaneous improvement of the differentiation and of the cost structures. In consequence controversy measures would be required. Solution attempts in the context of conventional business models exhibited the following characteristics: a strong rise of the information and communication intensity, an increase of the product type and number of variants, a reduction of the manufacturing lot size, unstable, frequently changing production processes and an extensive storekeeping in several stock levels (‘complexity costs'). Enterprises, which introduce the mass production for the individual customer, try to combine the advantages of mass production with those of individual manufacture. Intelligent competition strategies based upon concepts of the ‘Digital Factory' approach aim to overcome the traditional duality of ‘cost leadership' or ‘differentiation strategy' and to make both efficiency and effectiveness possible.

Mots clés: Physical Sciences

H J Bullinger, Wolfgang Schweizer. 18th ICPR plenary paper: Intelligent Production - Competition Strategies for Producing Enterprises. International Journal of Production Research, 2006, 44 (18-19), pp.3575-3584. ⟨10.1080/00207540600654491⟩. ⟨hal-00512899⟩