Open Production Systems
An assistance system for the evaluation and design of openness and the level of trust between supply chain partners
A project of the Cluster of Excellence “Internet of Production”
The Internet of Production strives for the integration of the major domains of a producing company along the lifecycle of a product (production, development and usage). This integration, enabled by the infrastructure of the Internet of Production, results in a new level and understanding of cross-domain collaboration due to real-time availability of semantically adequate and contextual data from these domains.
The research project "Open Production Systems" is part of the Cluster Research Domain “Production Management” (CRD-B3) within the "Internet of Production". The overarching vision of the project is to drastically increase the quality of decision-making in insecure business environments by improving production structures through intelligent assistance systems. The research question of this specific sub-project is: "How can openness be increased with regard to data exchange in the production network in order to reduce information asymmetries between the members of a supply chain? The aim is to assess the status quo of a business relationship and to provide practical recommendations for better supply chain collaboration.
This is because companies are confronted with an increasingly dynamic market environment and complex value-added relationships. Inter-company data exchange and collaboration between the various players are essential success factors for companies. A lack of data exchange and resulting information deficits cause problems in supply chains. At the same time, processes and decisions can be significantly improved by using additional information from supply chain partners. The degree of openness towards third parties is significantly influenced by the level of trust between companies. Therefore, we are developing an assistance system for the evaluation and design of openness and the level of trust between supply chain partners. Our app is about evaluating existing supplier relationships in terms of openness and trust in order to minimize challenges regarding the so-called "bullwhip" effect in the supply chain.
For the validation of the app prototype we are currently looking for interested company contacts who are working in the field of production (or are otherwise in exchange with supply chain partners) and would like to test our app. Based on this completely anonymous data collection, we will further develop the assistance systems in term of cluster analysis of usage types, user experience and design, conceptual refinements of scales and adaptation of variables, extension of the scope of application to larger production networks.