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Dealing with the strongly increasing complexity of the company itself and its environment has become a key competitive factor. Companies can only face the progressively increasing external complexity in global markets with an appropriate "healthy" internal complexity. It inevitably has to be adapted to market demands. If the internal complexity is too low, the external complexity cannot be mastered sufficiently. The complexity management in the company is therefore not effective. If the internal perspective is too high, the company thus has unnecessary efforts and the complexity management is not efficient. The complexity within socio-technical organizations such as e.g. value networks or industrial companies is characterized by the difficulties and turbulences encountered in daily business and can be described by four dimensions: variety, heterogeneity, dynamics and non-transparency. Most companies have not introduced or implemented a complexity management system in order to deal with these issues yet. Many companies do not know if the used management activities are efficient, effective and adequate. Therefore, companies have to be reviewed and evaluated regarding their complexity management maturity. Maturity models can be used to support the analysis and assessment of skills and development levels of products, processes or organizations. Such competence models are using defined levels of maturity, which can be used to describe the different achievable skill levels. Maturity models for the purposes of evaluation issues have several benefits such as finding vulnerabilities and identifying improvement measures, a better control over costs and time or an earlier and more accurate predictable release and introduction of complexity management activities. This paper presents basics of an advanced Complexity Management as well as an approach for a systematic evaluation of advanced Complexity Management maturity, describing the different levels and taking into account recommendations to increase the degree of maturity.

The way of dealing with the strongly increasing complexity of the company itself and its environment has become a key competitive factor. Complexity factors in a variety of different business areas require an advanced Complexity Management. Therefore, knowledge regarding the specifics of the respective complexity, the so-called Complexity Footprint, is decisive to meet requirements and to derive measures by using appropriate instruments. The current Fraunhofer IPA empirical study "advanced Complexity Management -the new management discipline" with more than 190 industrial participants shows, that companies expect a future increase in complexity, but not yet have the tools to deal with it. Furthermore, complexity management is mostly focused on the complexity field product and here in product modularization and variety management. The importance of ideal complexity, of product profitability in response to product complexity in connection with complexity in process and organization is mostly ignored.Within this paper the different activities and instruments of advanced Complexity Management are presented. This includes the approach of complexity patterns in value networks including production and supply chain as well as the summary of several complexity patterns to the Fraunhofer IPA Complexity Footprint. First an up-to-date survey on complexity in value networks is given. Then, the Stuttgart complexity comprehension is introduced. To define the external and internal complexity in socio-technical systems like value networks, the differences are presented. The difference between complicacy and complexity is given, within the complexity dimensions variety, heterogeneity, dynamics and opacity. After this, complexity fields such as goods and services, process and organization as well as their several subfields connectivity and interdependency are established. Examples for complexity in each field are given to highlight the different appearance of complexity. Following, the advanced Complexity Management is introduced and finally the Fraunhofer IPA Complexity Footprint is introduced. Within this Complexity Footprint the complexity patterns in value networks are located and a description is given.

The first factory of the year prize was granted more than 60 years ago in the USA. Since then, a considerable number of countries joined this way and several best factory assessment methods and awards have been developed on national, regional, and international levels. These competitions give the possibility for benchmarking the companies. However, in the era of industry 4.0 maturity models have emerged for evaluating individual enterprises' readiness. These models support the companies in the individual strategy development. But the companies are always interested in their results and achievements compared to their competitors. But setting up a benchmark for a part of an industrial sector might be challenging. Therefore, combining the factory of the year evaluation concept with the maturity assessment might be advantageous. In the paper both of the approaches are analysed and it is discussed how they might be linked in a meaningful way.