INTIME · In Time delivery in non-hierarchical Manufacturing Networks of Machinery and Equipment Industry

Non-hierarchical production networks are a common environment of today’s manufacturing companies. Each company is facing multiple and dynamic relationships within several networks. This complex situation causes permanent delivery delays. Delayed supplies lead to wasteful turbulences in the entire network and to expensive compensations. For the European manufacturing industry the loss of efficiency is estimated to be 1 billion Euros per year. Besides the costs the missing delivery reliability leads to poor customer satisfaction and increased lead times. The key objective of inTime is to improve delivery reliability in each customer-supplier relationship balancing production in the overall network. In order to foster delivery reliability each supply has to be rewarded according to his delivery performance. Today only a minority of supplies is successfully secured by manual negotiated delivery penalties. Due to the high variation of supplies manual levelling of incentives is a time consuming process. Therefore a fair share of risk between customer and supplier is not transparent. inTime will reach transparency by developing a market based negotiation mechanism rewarding delivery reliability at minimum transaction costs. Key innovation of the project is to establish an electronic market for trading reliability incentives. Besides the development of the market mechanism, the integration into the entire order process requires several novelties which have to be developed simultaneously: - The negotiation mechanism supports a new kind of order prioritisation. To realise this potential new planning and sequencing algorithms are needed. - In order to gain transparency on the criticality of each supply, functions analysing the internal risk and related costs of the required parts have to be developed. - Enabler for inTime is an automated order data communication. To avoid redundant developments inTime will apply the existing communication platform myOpenFactory.