Martin Poiger

The internationalization process in companies located at the borders of emerging and developed countries

Purpose – Despite geographical proximity, major economic differences exist between Western European countries and the formerly socialist Eastern European countries. The main objective of this study is to develop a better understanding of internationalization decision processes in this specific context.Design/methodology/approach – By means of multiple case study research, six Austrian and five Hungarian companies in order to extend and refine existing theory on internationalization decisions given the current situation in Central Europe are analyzed. In particular, the paper uses extant literature to build a conceptual framework from which we derive propositions as a basis and a guide for data collection and analysis.Findings – In addition to cost considerations, process and product innovations are becoming increasingly important dimensions in explaining the reasons for internationalization projects. The reasons for internalization and solutions (relocated products and processes, entry mode and location) ...

Dependency Between Performance of Production Processes and Variability - an Analysis Based on Empirical Data

It is commonly accepted that variability is one of the main challenges in designing and managing manufacturing processes. Many process improvement concepts that focus primarily on communication and information exchange, flow time reduction, etc., finally influence variability. In particular, they reduce variability or mitigate the operational effects of variability. Vendor managed inventory or collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment are just two examples of such concepts. The effect on selected performance measures is mostly shown by idealized quantitative models, but there are only few results from real-world processes. In our study we want to illustrate and quantify the impact of variability on the performance of production processes by means of two real manufacturing processes. Case process one is an assembly process of frequency inverters and case process two is the assembly process of sliding glass top systems. For the inverter assembly process we want to show the operational impact of reduced demand variability (reduced forecast error), achieved by implementing Vendor managed inventory as well as collaborative planning. In the glass top assembly process internal variability is addressed by assessing the impact of the production lot size. Both processes are mainly evaluated by using WIP and flow time as key performance measures. The analysis is conducted with rapid modeling software based on open queuing networks. Our results show that a reasonable decrease in inventory and flow time can be achieved without any decline of customer service.

Gestaltung und Bewertung von „Just-in-Sequence“ — Anlieferung in der Automobilindustrie

Ein weit verbreitetes Versorgungskonzept fur Produkte mit hoher Variantenvielfalt ist die Just-in-Sequence-Anlieferung. Dabei ist der Lieferant verpflichtet, die Zulieferteile zur richtigen Zeit und in der richtigen Reigenfolge zu liefern. Durch diese produktionssynchrone Anlieferung ist es moglich, dass Eingangslager beim Kunden einzusparen, gleichzeitig muss aber der Lieferant sehr hohe Bestande halten, um den geforderten Lieferservicegrad zu erreichen. Wir wollen in unserem Beitrag aufzeigen, wie Bestande und Kosten in der Supply Chain durch die Verschiebung des Kundenauftragsentkopplungspunkt gesenkt werden konnen, ohne den Servicegrad zu verschlechtern. Fur die Identifizierung und Bewertung der Prozessalternativen verwenden wir ein Simulationsmodell einer realen Supply Chain aus der Automobilindustrie.

Evaluation of Supply Process Improvements Illustrated by Means of a JIS Supply Process from the Automotive Industry

In this study, we show that some of the core aspects of supply chain management are not taken into account sufficiently by traditional evaluation systems. In particular, the functional separation of cost centers, which belong to the supply process, causes problems for evaluating supply chain improvements. We build up an evaluation model supported by process simulation to overcome these problems. This model is applied to an example from the automotive industry. We assess the effect of distance reduction and transport scheduling (frequency) within a just-in-sequence (JIS) supply process and we show effects of moving the customer order decoupling point (CODP).