Complementary partners need to work jointly in order to offer greater added-value to the final clients. They need to be coordinated to offer to the customer added-value and an ef- ficient service.
In order to achieve an optimum coordination between complementary partners to serve to the final clients, it is necessary to:
• Manage orders for the product pack between them
• Coordinate their production and distributions plans
• Share knowledge about actual and forecasted demand, that can be useful to plan production and distribution and to know customers’ trends
• Share information about available stock materials and/or production capacity (offered by the ATP/CTP extended models)
Then, in order to develop this business model, it will be necessary to establish a strong rela- tionship between complementary manufacturers; that is why good communication channels and agreements should be designed.
However, this business model has the following implications:
• The creation of a shared catalogue of collaborative products offered to the final cli- ent
• The development of an extended ATP/CTP model for the principal actors of the complementary value chains; in order to propose to the final client a delivery date in real-time
• Coordinate production and distribution times between complementary manufacturers to deliver the product on time
• Offer data about demand and forecast to other partners
Extended.Distribution.Models
An important problem that is necessary to analyse is how to update the upstream and down- stream distribution models for all actors in the meta-value chain in order to achieve the best global distribution model for the cross-value chain.
A reengineering in the whole cross-value chain can be found necessary to develop the new distribution model. It can also be necessary to develop new work procedures in all affected models in the distribution, and take into account all actors in the cross-value chain.
Following are described some steps in the distribution models that are necessary to analyse and eventually to reengineer:
• Load of individual products development for actors in the cross-value chain
• Transport from manufacturers to a consolidation area
• Consolidation: This can include picking, packing, assembly, treatment, and so forth, depending on the product, the market, and the business model to be defined.
• Product.presentation: how the product is presented to the final customer
• Returns logistics
The.Social.Problem
Workers have to be knowledge-driven workers rather than machine feeders. In fact, the communication system of a knowledge-based meta-value chain will allow the incorpora- tion of learning and training procedures within the communication system itself, and will create methods for remote transfer of skills, both between different enterprises and inside a single enterprise.
Interpersonal skills must be highly developed, cross-cultural barriers must be greatly reduced, and remaining differences must be assessed for their contributions to innovate manufactur- ing. Individuals must have a sense of purpose and satisfaction, and be able to clearly see how their skills and intellectual capabilities add value to the enterprise. Information systems and methods for remote transfer of skills will enhance workers’ access and usability of information, thus reducing the current gap between individual intellectual capabilities and shared knowledge.
By introducing better modelling methods, partners and users will be able to exploit new styles of cooperation in an optimal way.
We can frequently find the most amazing comparisons between science and economics.
Charles Darwin once said that “it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change”. This is the key to enterprise integration success.
Future.Trends
Information systems will play an important role, where trust will be valorised.
New IT tools and applications will appear to enable the collaboration between industrial part- ners presenting different profiles (ranging from very small companies to large multinational ones). Leading companies continue, and will continue, to use Internet-based technologies to develop new collaborative relationships with suppliers.
The inherent risk that arises is that enterprises, and especially SMEs, do not manage to fully integrate on time and lose competitive advantage awarded to collaborative value chains and meta-value chains, and remain left aside from tomorrow’s competitive productive su- perstructures. Consequently, there appears to be a clear need to establish a wide-reaching scenario to pose the problem.
Global synergy of business cultures, new business dynamics, knowledge interchange, re- newed industrial paradigms and supporting improved regulation policies and laws will be keywords for the success of international industrial policies.
Moreover, close integration and networking of people, organisations, and technologies, will be the crucial input to maintain competitive production. The focus will be on moving more and more towards the collaboration with partners, both within and outside the value chain, seeking an enhanced value proposition.
Added-value products must be achieved and tailored to meet customers’ demand.
New organisational structures and work practices are emerging. The change to innovative high performance logistics and distribution systems, with agile collaborative value chains and meta-value chains will be tomorrow’s major industrial challenge.
Conclusion
Selling chain management, extended enterprises, and collaborative enterprises are clearly identified as today’s and tomorrow’s business opportunities.
The competitiveness improvement will come from the greater focus on consumer needs and time to market decrease, through the packaging of products and increase in the amount and quality of associated services to those packaged products, thanks to the collaboration of dynamic re-engineered and integrated complementary value chains.
Benefits for companies come from the reduction in time to market and integration with complementary products value chains and systems. Even more, the possibilities of com- mercialising not only in their selling points, but in complementary products resellers, can open an expectable increase in sales per year.
Although, manufacturing and commercialising companies compound the initially-targeted market, the potential market can be extended to all industrial and consulting companies involved or willing to be involved in extended collaborative selling chains, focused on packaged complementary products offered to the customer.
It is urgent to increase industry’s innovation capacity and adaptability to change to extended collaborative business models, tomorrow’s production systems, while enhancing flexibility and capability to respond in real-time to customer needs.
The challenge is especially critical for SMEs, as they are facing the risk of being left aside in tomorrow’s competitive industry, but at the same time lacking in required skills, collab- orative culture, and power to negotiate.
We have discussed the extended collaborative enterprise Integration model in this chapter as a next stage, in the hope that it will be developed and improved in the future. Hopefully, the reader will end up with more questions upon reaching the end of this chapter than when he or she began.
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