مدل های کسب و کار جدید و روش های پیکربندی برای سیستم های تولیدی انعطاف پذیر ـ متمرکز

In the current competitive scenario, industrial companies experience frequent unexpected changes in production demand. To cope with them, they often opt for investments in manufacturing technologies which embed extra-flexibility that is rarely utilized and that, consequently, penalizes financial and operational performance. In this paper, new business models for focused-flexibility manufacturing systems are proposed to improve manufacturing performances in turbulent environments and to increase machine builders competitiveness though the offering of high value-added services. These innovative business models should be enabled by the adoption of new integrated methods for the joint production system-business model configuration. Starting from the available state of the art on production systems configuration, the paper illustrates research activities in progress to finalize the development of such methodological enablers for new flexibility-oriented business models.

The reduction of products lifecycle due to accelerated technological trends or to very fast market dynamics generated by modern consumption uses, can be the cause of frequent changes in the products characteristics and in the volume of demand. A fundamental key success factor, especially for manufacturers operating in sectors where turbulence is higher, is the capacity to rapidly follow unexpected market fluctuations in order to keep customers satisfied and to acquire the reputation of reliable suppliers. However, to reach these goals, they must rely on manufacturing technologies with the flexibility or re-configurability level that allows such rapid changes in volumes and features of the produced parts. Thus, the decision on the level of flexibility [3][13] and re-configurability of manufacturing systems is a key decision which can strongly affect company competitiveness. Typically, in fact, flexible manufacturing systems –systems that have the embedded potential to adapt to external changes- are expensive and less performing in case of volume productions, while reconfigurable manufacturing systems [7] – systems that have the enablers to be easily modified to adapt to external changes- present a lower initial investment cost but may require additional cost (and time) to be reconfigured, which could be not compatible with market requests [15].To optimize the decision on the flexibility and re-configurability level of manufacturing systems, recent research proposed new system configuration methods based on stochastic programming that suggest the type and number of machines to include in the system layout in order to cope with the expected variability by optimizing cost functions [14]. These methods allow the configuration of the so called “focused -flexibility manufacturing systems”, meaning with this that the system has the optimal flexibility level for the considered production scenario [11][12]. But how can these novel approaches be a valuable resource for manufacturing companies? Since they are the result of recent research developments, they are quite complicated from the computational point of view and are currently manageable only by expert researchers rather than manufacturing customers. Furthermore, they take a dichotomic approach in which only the machine tool builder or the manufacturing customer perspective can be considered at the same time (by using objective functions maximizing machine tool builder profit or minimizing customer investment costs). Finally, these models consider mainly technology system and machinery-related variable, such as process feature, pallet time,tools, etc., while neglect wider costs and revenues at business level, such as financial, logistics, organizational and service variables.Thus, in order to take advantage from the possibilities offered by innovative flexible and reconfigurable technologies and novel configuration approaches, an effort to shift at business model level the opportunities of manufacturing flexibility is needed.

This paper presented two promising flexibility-oriented manufacturing business models: “reconfiguration guarantee” business model and“ capacity guarantee” business model. They foresee that,by using proper configuration methods for focused-flexibility production systems design, production systems suppliers are able to manage manufacturing flexibility better than customers and can create a dditional value for them.The advantage for suppliers is both in the increase of the market, thanks to this differentiating value proposition, and in the higher profits that can be practiced thanks to the created additional value. The advantage for customers is in the optimization of investments for production capacity and in the concentration on the core business.In order to enable these new business models, new integrated approaches to jointly consider production system and business model design should be developed.This is the scope of the described ongoing European research.