The added value network

Volltext: Presently, a drastic change is taking place concerning the competition structure manufacturing companies are exposed to, making traditional organization forms reach their limits. Contributing to this are an accelerated speed of change of nearly all influence factors relevant to a company, such as market fluctuations, technological developments, the general political and social framework, the globalization of sales and supply markets etc. This development culminates in the demand for new structural forms to organize the industrial value creation in a business-oriented way. The vertical integration of single corporate functions does not fulfill the requirements anymore and has to be substituted by an organization form deriving directly from environmental developments, characterized by: - adaptable, dynamic (agile) structures - reduced corporate complexity despite increased complexity of methods, products and services - stable, disturbance-free processes despite distributed valu e creation, global resourcing and distribution - exploitation of the possibilities offered by modern information infrastructure (e.g. EDI, WWW). Dynamic organization forms - as the virtual company - are able to meet the demands of the future. They are based on the idea of combining individual company units in a case-oriented, dynamic configuration of a production network in order to achieve a synergetic effect. The application of virtual organization principles in the production process generates flexible and re-programmable manufacturing systems open to re-configuration. The possibility to integrate dynamic enterprise-structures extends to varied internal and external systems and to future systems as well. If the idea of a dynamic production network is put into practice consistently, the virtual company offers a maximum degree of agility