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.