Industrial Mathematics: Driving a New Management Approach

Abstract

The current challenge of managing businesses and companies is enormously complex, due to the ever-changing markets, the speed of mass communication, the power of the highly informed customers, the disruptive nature of some sectors and the difficulty in quickly incorporating everything simultaneously. The critical and intuitive vision, extremely valuable and necessary nowadays, demands a higher level of accurate data to assess the diverse business factors and more precise forecasts. Today, we are facing numerous of those changes in the automotive industry, as well as the associated uncertainty of the impact on our existing business model. Nevertheless, it is certain that it will be huge and require a detailed preparation. Industrial Mathematics (IM) provides extremely valuable methods and tools to manage these challenges, while demanding open, creative and critical thinking to reach novel solutions. Based on an integrated approach to know-how, IM acts as a mobilizing agent which drives organizations to higher levels of performance. At NORS we strongly believe in the cooperative interactions between academy, research centres and industry, which provide unique conditions for fostering people and in essence the bottom-line—the business profitability. This paper aims to share our industrial mathematics journey and somehow highlight the potential of changing an organizational mindset. In the first section, a brief company overview will be present followed, in the second section, by an explanation of how and why a mathematical approach was selected. In the following sections, the lessons learned and the achievements obtained during this process will be presented—the results speak for themselves.