Collaborative Demand Capacity Planning

The automotive industry is encountered by two big challenges. The first one especially at present time is the shifting of customers´ demands from bigger cars to more fuel efficient ones. The second one is a long term shift in the customer order decoupling point - maybe initialized by the PC industry (like Dell in the 90´s) - enabling the configuration of the car individually. Therefore, the automotive industry has to address a paradigm shift from Make-to-Stock (MTS) towards Assemble-to-Order (ATO) and further Make-to-Order (MTO). Mainly caused by cost saving programmes manufacturing of components is continuously outsourced to suppliers. These suppliers are categorized in tiers and in total about 80% of the components of a car model are manufactured by suppliers. This paper introduces three remedies as CDCP (Collaborative Demand Capacity Planning), EC/EI (Enterprise Collaboration / Enterprise Interoperability ) Services and Serious Gaming. A combination of these three remedies should mitigate the above mentioned challenges of the automotive industry. Further more the potential of providing EC/EI services as SaaS (Software as a Service) utilities will be considered.