New collaborative BTO process in automotive production

Today, the automotive industry is operating, in common with other manufacturing industries, in turbulent environments, mainly caused by changing customer purchase behaviour, increased international competition, overcapacities and decreasing margins. These developments affect the industry in two ways. Firstly, customers demand vehicles that are built to individual specifications. This has resulted in a dramatic products and parts variants proliferation and has subsequently led to an increase in operations and logistics costs. Secondly, delivery time has become a competitive factor to the OEMs. Both, researchers and practitioners state that the automotive industry's demanding customers no longer accept long delivery times. Therefore, they have discussed build-to-order (BTO) as a new concept to cope with the new challenges. BTO refers to a demand-driven production approach where a product is scheduled and built in response to a confirmed order received for it from a final customer. Only parts beyond a defined decoupling point are produced based on forecasts. In such a manufacturing network the whole supply chain must be flexible enough to adjust to short-term demand fluctuations without loosing economies of scale. Today, the flexibility of a manufacturing system is mainly restricted by inflexible product structures, labour conditions and subsequently inflexible supply chains.