The FMNA-Approach - A Concept to Manage Change Flexibility and Volume Flexibility within a Build-to-Order-Strategy in the Car Industry

In the car industry a change concerning the production strategy can be observed. The customer oriented build-to-order strategy is becoming, especially among premium car manufactures like Mercedes Audi or BMW, more popular. Although the strategy offers a lot of advantages, disadvantages must be also considered. Primarily the wide range of configuration possibilities and the chance to change configuration until start of production increase complexity and uncertainty and finally make supply chain planning difficult. A demand management could be an approach to improve the planning process. Within this paper, such an approach is presented, that enables car manufactures like to identify the "optimal" degree of change-flexibility, which is expected by the customers. As basis served an empirical survey of car buyers (800 data sets) that was conducted to examine the aspect "car configuration/purchasing process". These results were used to create the demand management model which is based on the yield management system of the airline industry. The approach combines customer orientation and an improved manufacturing performance by managing change flexibility and customer demand in time and quantity. This enables the whole supply chain to shave peaks in production, to improve data quality and realise cost savings. These benefits could be identified at manufacturers and illustrate the advantages of implementing the model.