Network-Centric Collaboration and Supporting Frameworks

Abstract

The automotive industry is facing new challenges from increasing product diversification and complexity, decreasing product live cycle times and the permanent need for cost reduction. Car Manufacturers are assigning more and more development tasks and manufacturing orders to suppliers. Suppliers need to create temporary alliances of organizations to share skills, competences and resources. These dynamie automotive networks are facing similar challenges like Dynamic Virtual Organizations (DVO) do. The ramp-up as linking phase between development phase and manufacturing phase has a crucial role for the suceess of the network. The whole system has to switch from a development network to a supply chain. The performance of a ramp-up depends on the maturity of the product and the manufacturing process. Knowledge management is an extraordinary driver for both. Making the relevant knowledge of all enterprises accessible to the members of the network requires more than existing methods and tools in single enterprises could provide. The new approach considers methods and technologies to weave knowledge nets for entire dynamic automotive networks.