Excellence in Innovation Vol. 1

Today manufacturing companies in high-wage countries are more than ever confronted with rapidly changing requirements and an uncertain global environment. Shorter product lifecycles and development cycles, more product variants caused by more differentiated customer demands, an increasing product complexity and functional complexity as well as decreasing delivery and throughput times are characteristic consequences for companies in this turbulent environment. Companies need to structure internal and external complexity in an effective and efficient way (e.g. in modular product platforms) and they need to execute changes along the value chain. Often there is no systematic process to tackle the problem of overwhelming complexity in products and processes.