**1. Introduction**

646 Mechanical Engineering

Treynor J.L., Black F. (1976). Corporate investment decisions. In: *Modern Developments in* 

Today's manufacturing companies embedded in non-hierarchical production networks are facing multiple and dynamic customer-supplier-relationships. In the course of increasing complexity of products and growing needs for flexibility and product variation companies focus more on core competencies and thus more production processes are shifted to external suppliers. This complex environment leads to growing coordination-efforts and wasteful turbulences throughout the entire network. The result is a delivery reliability of usually less than 65% within the European machinery and equipment industry generating an estimated loss of efficiency of 1 billion Euros per year. Besides additional costs the missing delivery reliability entails poor customer satisfaction and increased lead times compromising the competitiveness of individual companies as well as the entire machinery and equipment industry (Gunasekaran, 2000; Reinhart, 2006).

In order to handle the given complexity, the procurement processes have to be managed according to the needs of the respective situation determined by the ordered product and the involved supplier. That means, the design, standardization and configuration of practically applicable order management processes according to the certain business context becomes a key factor. A context-aligned process configuration would lead to a tailored capacity to act and could improve performance and delivery reliability within the machinery and equipment industry.

The issue of poor delivery reliability is addressed within the publicly funded research and development project "inTime" (Funded by the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission, EU FP7-NMP, No. NMP2-SL-2009-229132). Within the project typologies are derived based on practical input from companies which distinguish and characterize certain product / service-types as well as certain business-relationship types, which have a direct influence on the design and handling of the respective order management processes between the involved companies. These types then serve as starting point for the limitation and design of relevant reference process phases of order-handling, respectively procurement-handling. The processes are described in detail and are enriched by the detailed definition of the transferred information within the intercompany interfaces.

Configuration Logic of Standard Business

**3. The basics of typification**

Fig. 2. Structure of a morphological scheme

Processes for Inter-Company Order Management 649

The next interaction task basically deals with the scheduling of the intended product or service exchange as well as with the assessment of availabilities. The information exchanged in this context is hence called scheduling & availability information. This type of information again includes master data, such as procurement times of standard parts, and order-specific data, such as current demands for materials or parts and required resources. In the following course of the companies´ interaction, a number of written documents typically have to be exchanged in order to provide a legally binding basis for the scope of supply to be provided. These documents, among which are e.g. mandatory proposals, reservations, orders and order confirmations, mainly stipulate the terms and conditions agreed on during the clarification of the specifications as well as the during the scheduling and the availability assessment. The type of information exchanged in this context is called consent information. The final interaction task of monitoring & controlling eventually leads to the last type of information exchanged in the course of the inter-company order execution. That is the corresponding type of monitoring & control information. Monitoring & control information are for instance internal or external progress or status reports,

dispatch or release notifications as well as sporadic malfunction information.

could be described by the attributes highlighted in green (A3, B2, C3, D3).

A typification can basically be regarded as a process of aggregation and abstraction, which describes, structures and eventually reduces the complexity of an issue to essential aspects, via the definition types. Numerous projects from research and practice have proven the method of typification to be a suitable tool for the structuring of complex organizational situations, which include a variety of different business forms (Grosse-Oetringhaus, 1974; Büdenbender, 1991; Diemer, 1992). In this context, a type represents a number of objects with a common set of features and attributes. A conceptual and structural basis for the creation of types is typically provided by morphological schemes, also called morphologies. Morphologies are usually matrices, which visualize the set of features and their respective attributes characterizing a certain type (cf. Figure 2). A fictive "type 1" could for instance be characterized by the combination of the attributes highlighted in grey (A2, B1, C2, D2) whereas a fictive "type 2"

The respective choice of features within a morphology highly depends on the requirements of the desired analysis. Since the creation of types is therefore always subject to a specific
