Tue, 04.07.2017

Supplier Development

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Pannek

LogDynamics, Universität Bremen, Germany

 
For many years, companies have been outsourcing activities, which are not at the heart of the goal of the company. Yet, they still require respective products. Since the outsourced activities are not highly profitable, the new companies cannot invest a lot of resources into improving these products. For other suppliers, a similar situation is observed especially if large OEMs are at the end of the supply chain.
 
To further improve the products of the OEMs, also the suppliers need to improve their components. To support this process, many companies like, e.g., Toyota, Boeing, Daimler, Volkswagen, Dell and Siemens used a variety of supplier development activities such as providing performance feedback, training suppliers' personnel, furnishing temporary on-site support to enhance further interaction, providing equipment and tool, and even dedicating capital resources to suppliers.
 
While it is known from empirical studies that supplier development is a key factor to strengthen competitiveness of a supply chain, we face certain difficulties: For one, a supplier delivers parts not only to one OEM, but to possibly many of them. And secondly, supplier development requires a long term commitment of both parties. The latter reduces flexibility in the supply chain and thereby directly obstructs the flexibility goal of Industrie 4.0. In this course, we consider a coopetitve approach to deal with both issues at the same time.
 

Short profile

Jürgen Pannek studies financial mathematics at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Warwick from 1999 to 2005. Thereafter, he worked as scientific assistant at the University of Bayreuth and completed his PhD thesis Receding Horizon Control: A Suboptimality based Approach in 2009. He continued working at the University of Bayreuth within the DFG priority program Control Theory of Digitally Networked Systems. In 2010 he received a PostDoc grant from the Germany Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina and continued his research at Curtin University of Technology Perth. After returning to Germany, he worked within the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich, where he was responsible for the startup of the robotic laboratory. In February 2014, he took over the assistant professorship Dynamics in Logistics at the University of Bremen.