Abstract
Increasing complexity in manufacturing companies has been one of the biggest issues during the last years. Companies in high-technology marketplaces are confronted with technology innovation, dynamic environmental conditions, changing customer requirements, globalization of markets and competitions as well as market uncertainty. Manufacturing companies can’t escape these trends, which induce an increasing amount of complexity. Reasons for this phenomenon are internal and external sources of complexity so-called complexity drivers. Identifying, analyzing and understanding complexity drivers are the first step for complexity management’s development and implementation. Complexity management is a strategic issue for companies to be competitive. The purpose of this literature review is to provide a general overview regarding complexity drivers in manufacturing companies. The different definitions of complexity drivers are described, and a new overall definition of complexity drivers is presented. Furthermore, the existing approaches for complexity driver’s identification, operationalization and visualization are identified and specified. For complexity driver’s clustering, a superior classification system was developed based upon existing classification systems in the literature. The literature review was done by systematically analyzing and collecting existing literature and reveals gaps according to methodology and issue. Existing literature reviews are only focused on specific issues, such as logistics or supply chain management, and do not point out the applied research methodology in detail. A general overview regarding complexity drivers in manufacturing companies and along the value chain does not exist yet.
Highlights
Technology innovation, dynamic environmental conditions, changing customer requirements, market’s globalization and market uncertainty are trends that manufacturing companies cannot escape and that often lead to an increase in complexity [86, 177, 198]
Serdarasan [255, 256] reviews the ‘‘typical complexity drivers that are faced in different types of supply chain and presents the complexity driver and solution strategy pairings in the form of a matrix’’
Serdarasan [256] enhances the content of her first paper and reviews the ‘‘typical complexity drivers that are faced in different types of supply chains and present the complexity driver and solution strategy pairings based on good industry practices‘‘
Summary
Technology innovation, dynamic environmental conditions, changing customer requirements, market’s globalization and market uncertainty are trends that manufacturing companies cannot escape and that often lead to an increase in complexity [86, 177, 198]. Complexity has increased continuously in many industries [242] This is one of the biggest challenges that manufacturing companies have to face today [71]. The origin of the term complexity comes from the Latin word ‘‘complexus’’, which means ‘‘extensive, interrelated, confusing, entwined or twisted together’’ [71, 88, 103, 199]. This is similar to the Oxford Dictionaries [182] definition of ‘‘complex’’: Something is complex if it is ‘‘consisting of many different and connected parts’’ and it is ‘‘not easy to analyze or understand’’. GellMann [85] and Luhmann [163] argue that the definition of complexity always needs a description of system’s level of
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