Functionalities of Supporting IT Systems: Current Situation, Future Requirements and Innovative Approaches

Abstract

Information technology (IT) issues are a major enabler of the new logistics concepts necessary to manufacture and deliver a built-to-order car in within 5 days. Unfortunately, the current IT infrastructure and systems applied within the automotive industry do not fulfil the requirements posed by new collaborative processes. The existing legacy systems were originally built for a “different world” of IT development, specific tasks (not integrated) and where technology was associated with central control. Thus, supply chain partners currently depend on software applications exchanging information mostly on the basis of proprietary data schemes and interfaces using non-standard transportation and application protocols hampering customised system integration. New collaborative interaction approaches, however, require the flexible integration of IT systems from different organisations. The resulting IT infrastructure must be interoperable and has to follow a distributed architecture. On the basis of a common understanding of content and the meaning of information transferred by computer systems, intelligent IT technologies such as ontology-based data interoperability and service-orientated design principles support stakeholders in coping with the increased run-time complexity of supply chain management amongst integrated network partners.