Abstract

Many industrial sectors are currently being challenged with regard to the flexibility and adaptability of their production and control processes, which can, inter alia, be attributed to macroeconomic trends such as digitisation. These trends not only shorten product lifecycles but also lead to a greater need for redesign and transformation of production systems within factories. Since this field of factory planning tends to play a subordinate role in SMEs anyway, the above-mentioned factors impede an efficient execution of corresponding projects even more. While large companies are more likely to have a factory planning department, SMEs often do not have sufficient resources to meet the aforementioned challenges through independent factory planning projects. Although network-based structures could be a realistic and practical way to meet the challenges of factory planning as they generally provide possibilities for resource and risk sharing, SMEs often manifest resentments towards network collaborations. This paper aims to validate these resentments. For this purpose, a profound expert study explores whether network cooperations could overcome companies’ challenges. It derives implications towards a model that enables network cooperations in factory planning.

摘要

许多工业部门目前在其生产和控制过程的灵活性和适应性方面面临挑战，这主要归因于数字化等宏观经济趋势。这些趋势不仅缩短了产品生命周期，而且还导致工厂内更需要重新设计和改造生产系统。由于这个领域的工厂规划无论如何，g往往在中小企业中扮演从属角色，上述因素更加阻碍了相应项目的有效执行。虽然大公司更有可能拥有工厂规划部门，但中小企业通常没有足够的资源通过独立的工厂规划项目来应对上述挑战。尽管基于网络的结构可能是应对工厂规划挑战的一种现实和实用的方式，因为它们通常提供资源和风险共享的可能性，但中小企业往往表现出对网络协作的不满。本文旨在验证这些怨恨。为此，一项深入的专家研究探讨了网络合作是否可以克服公司的挑战。