Complex product manufacturing in the intelligence-connected era

Abstract

Enterprise sustainability will be important for businesses in the intelligence-connected (Internet of Things, etc.) era, especially for high-variety low-volume businesses facing complex manufacturing problems for their products. We propose that many efficient management models are being developed to cope with these issues, applying highly flexible resource configurations to enable quick response to an ever-changing market environment. Supply chains inherently involve complexity, as multiple organizational supply chains have become predominant as opposed to the traditional vertically organized monopolies such as Standard Oil and US Steel. Turner, Aitken, and Bozarth (2018) examined the literature to describe supply chain complexity. The strategic role of information systems was noted by Turunen, Eloranta, and Hakanen (2018), while Zdravković et al. (2018) reviewed issues in the relationship of enterprise information systems infrastructure in the Internet-of-Things era. This complexity within supply chains involves many interactions across levels (Dittfeld, Scholten, and Van Donk 2018). Advances in technology have led to smarter factories that can be optimized in some sense (Yin et al. 2018). Intelligent planning enables more intelligent systems, enabling standardized complex physical entities and processes, accumulation of knowledge at different levels of complexity, thus providing decision makers with more timely and accurate information. This evolution expands beyond manufacturing to distributive trade (De Leeuw, Grotenhuis, and van Goor 2013), finance (Lam 2018), and services (Kreye 2019). In response to the call for papers, we received more than 50 submissions. After the review process, we have successfully ended up with 10 excellent papers presenting a variety of techniques to deal with special problems in a variety of topic areas. Complex product planning and resource configuration

Viability of intertwined supply networks: extending the supply chain resilience angles towards survivability. A position paper motivated by COVID-19 outbreak

“…Most recently, Fraccascia, Giannoccaro, and Albino (2017) point to the multiple, intersecting SCs in the industrial symbiosis which are characterised by using the waste of some SC processes as the inputs into the other SCs (Pathak, Wu, and Johnston 2014). Olson et al (2018) elaborate on the intelligence-connected manufacturing. Moreover, Industry 4.0 and cyber-physical manufacturing have significantly transformed the SCs and increased their intertwining (Liao et al 2017;Ivanov, Dolgui, and Sokolov 2019;Panetto et al 2019;Tang and Veelenturf 2019).…”