Process Planning in Supply Consortia

Abstract

Nowadays, value creation is mainly based on a strict division of labor. Specialists providing particular services act on the market instead of companies offering complete value creation chains (Stadtler, 2002). This is mainly caused by (i) a drastic reduction of the width of market opportunity windows (Stock et al., 2000); (ii) the pressure to continuously re-improve products and services (Ballou et al., 2000) and (iii) the requirement to gain increasing profit (Lambert and Cooper, 2000). The specialization of a companymakes it possible to capture the synergy of intra- and intercompany integration and management (Lambert and Cooper, 2000), and especially to realize economies of scale (Corsten, 2007). Thus, the fulfillment of customer demand with full service at competitive prices calls for a temporal collaboration among the specialists in order to organize the required value creation processes.