Project

Motivation
The electronic industry is a fast developing market segment. To stay competitive, European companies have to respond with improved flexibility to changing requirements. To increase flexibility, companies must operate in non-hierarchical networks of trusted suppliers to short cut decision making processes, in particular on tactical and strategic levels. Today, existing decision flows within and across companies are well structured at the level of operational management and shop floor coordination. In contrast, at the strategic and tactical levels, inter-organizational decision flows are not well formalized. Several aspects, like missing rules for transactions impede with shared decision-making, resulting in a lack of confidentiality or of knowledge about the network partners’ goals and activities.

Approach
An European consortium of ten partners from five European countries has been formed. The scientific partners supported the project with their expertise in process and decision modelling and analysis. The IT focused partners contribute their advanced knowledge in CRM and SRM solutions as on ERP Systems. The application partners provided necessary information for the development of the ODM as focal companies and were the prototype’s first end users.

Results
The project developed a collaboration framework for the strategic and tactical management levels, called Open Decision Framework. It consists of three main components: First, a reference model for collaboration on the management levels in non-hierarchical networks. Second, a deployment process that describes the reference model’s application at the different usage levels. The project’s last result was a prototype, which makes use of existing CRM/SRM-Tools, and extends and adapts them to the new reference model.