Successful Collaboration in Global Production Networks - fair, secured, connected

In today's world, manufacturing companies face many challenges due to the uncertainty and complexity of environmental influences as well as increasing competitive pressures. The pandemic has clearly illustrated how volatile and fragile our supply chains have become. One way to overcome these chal-lenges together is to collaborate with other companies in the value network.
Collaborations, i.e. successful cooperation with strategic partners and customers to achieve common goals, will continue to gain in importance. Instead of individual companies, entire value chains and networks will therefore compete with each other in the future. This will require a shift toward fast and seamless data exchange between the players in the value network.
Advancing digitization and thus a generally increasingly networked world are increasingly supporting such collaborations, as the sharing and collaborative use of data is becom-ing much simpler. At the same time, the right handling of data will be decisive for competition. Digitization is moving from being a driver of change to an enabler of change. Innovative business models and the exploita-tion of the potential hidden in data will make it possible to realize reliable, flexible and, at the same time, resource-conserving value creation. ... mehr
The number of existing cloud-based collaboration platforms is growing steadily. Small and medium-sized enterprises in particular have to serve many different customer platforms at the same time, while they them-selves are still struggling with internal digitization challenges. Standardization initiatives for secure data rooms in the industry, such as GAIA-X, therefore hold great potential.
In addition to these fundamental infrastructural issues, there are further challenges with regard to collaboration projects. Particular importance is attached to the competent handling of data protection and data security. There are often reservations that the disclosure of data and information will result in the loss of hard-earned expertise and com-petitive advantages that have been built up over time. At the same time, however, users from an engineering environment are only able to assess the risks of digital collaboration to a limited extent. In order to secure one's own competitive position in the long term, digital competencies must therefore be built up and barriers to collaboration overcome.
Success stories and clear recommendations for action can provide an important impetus for the implementation of successful collaboration projects, showing how collaborations can be approached in practice and what added value they generate. That is why we would like to provide manufacturing compa-nies with such guidance in the form of this action guide. The collaboration projects explained below and the best practices derived from them are intended to help companies find their own strategies on the path to more collaboration. We hope you enjoy reading this guide and are always available for questions and discussions.