CollPlexity
Coordinator
Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL)
Partners
- Germany: Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL)
- Switzerland: Institute for Technology Management (ITEM)
- Israel: Global Research & Financing
- Germany: Schiesser Group
- Hungary: Computer and Automation Research Institute (MTA SZTAKI)
- Germany: Virtuelle Fabrik AG
Description
This project will move away from existing approaches to collaboration and targets the interdisciplinary development of a generic model of complexity as basis for a problem-to-system match framework for collaborative systems in production industry. The project’s interdisciplinary research approach will expand the available knowledge on the underlying mechanisms of collaborations.Companies lacking the flair for crafting and managing inter-organisational networks are disadvantaged in the modern business environment. Managing the complexity of these networks is no easy task. The COLL-PLEXITY consortium’s ambition is twofold — to leverage fundamental insights from the new discipline of complexity science for industrial managers and to advance the field of complexity science by applying it to the social world where network management takes place.
Objective is to fashion practical tools for industrial managers as a support to improve their decision-making for building and managing inter-organisational networks. To an increasing number of contemporary businesses, the ability to manage inter-organisational networks is nothing less than vital. The importance of networking is nothing new, of course, but it has increased with the emergence of outsourcing, e-marketplaces and virtual enterprises. One of the COLL-PLEXITY partners, Virtuelle Fabrik AG, exemplifies the trend — a network of 72 diverse SMEs organised via three virtual factories. By pooling the resources and coordinating the efforts of its member companies, each ‘factory’ is able to manufacture products which none of those SMEs could have taken on in the past. Projects involving SMEs from two or more factories are possible, too. However, these require a better understanding of the often complex dynamics of interorganisational collaboration.