DOI: 10.5176/2251-1970_BizStrategy18.124
Authors: Günther Schuh, Stephan Schröder and Marcel Faulhaber
Abstract: Shrinking product lifecycles, increasing market volatility and higher customer demands are challenging companies to innovate faster, cheaper and more radical within the last years. One solution to address this increasing innovation pressure is the use of agile, highly iterative development approaches also for the development of physical products. Besides a reduction of development times and costs this should also enable an increasing fulfilment of customer requirements. One of the major challenges companies are facing in the context of agile development projects is the collaboration with suppliers. Today most producing companies are strongly dependent on external partners during product development due to decreasing depths of added value. Inefficient and ineffective collaboration with suppliers result in project delays, cost increases and unused innovation potential. Thus, a suited integration of suppliers is mandatory for a successful implementation of agile development approaches. Due to not negligible coordination efforts a uniform, early and intensive integration of supplies is not a suitable solution. Therefore, this paper presents a model for the configuration of a demand-oriented supplier integration in agile development projects. In a first step, characteristic attributes of procurement objects have been identified based on a profound literature review. Using the evaluation of the identified attributes in a second step the requirements on the design of the supplier integration have been derived.
Keywords: iterative development processes, agile new product development, procurement, supplier integration
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