Controlling customer orders in the eto/vuca contexts

Abstract

Under hyper-competition customers expect to accept last-minute changes in their orders. In such circumstances ETO manufacturing exhibits the VUCA specificity and suffers from many issues like delays, excessive costs, low quality etc. This paper examines operative controlling as a mean to facilitate discovery and response to the changes and disturbances. The approach derives from the phenomenological research and the reflection on theory and practice. The solution uses an integrated model that represents all workflows subject to changeable contexts and is based on three pillars: (i) run-time data extraction; (ii) integrated representation of workflows; (iii) providing current information to shareholders. The concept was validated by prototyping and a use-case.