Informationshantering i en kundorderstyrd försörjningskedja : En fallstudie hos Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery AB

In companies building complex products to customer orders a larger part of production is often placed with suppliers to allow the company to be flexible and quickly react to market changes. Companies in these customer oriented supply chains then allow suppliers to construct components according to the supplier’s own expertise by only giving functional specifications when purchasing parts and systems. This leads to an information shortage in the buying company since the supplier now owns component information, which previously belonged to the buying company. This case study is based on interviews with persons in the supply chain, from engineering through delivery to customer. Error reports and other secondary data are also used to verify the information from the interviews. The demand for information and waste, as a result of the lacking information for the studied functions in the supply chain, is identified. Through a situation analysis, which is connected to theory, the study finds an information shortage after the purchasing function in the chain. Functions downstream from the purchasing function have a need for more component information than what is provided today. The conclusions found by the study are the following: • A high level of integration with suppliers is needed to enable the necessary exchange of information.• The flow of information in a supply chain is an essential part of the puzzle for the flow to work optimally without sub optimizations.• Being able to perform an arrival check of the purchased goods is an important part of managing a producing company and applies to all entities where goods are received.• Product views of a product structure should be applied for different functions in the supply chain.• Siemens need an article number in the business system for every component that is delivered, apart from the articles that arrives fully assembled. Also, all deliveries need to be parcel handled.The study also proposes a method to graphically present the need for component information in a supply chain and a solution for Siemens with product views connected to the identified limitations in the business system SAP. To be able to fully implement the proposals provided by this study, future studies need to be made. Suggestions on these are the identification of the material not arriving fully assembled and/or is removed when shipping to customer in the end of the assembly. Also, more studies needs to be done regarding the flow of information in customer oriented supply chains producing complex products since the research in this area is hard to find today.Validerat; 20121022 (anonymous