Information Management for Materials Supply Systems Design

The aim of this paper is to categorise difficulties related to release and use of information for materials supply systems design during product development projects as well as specific approaches to deal with them. In the literature it has been argued that materials supply systems design should form one dimension of concurrent engineering and be coordinated with product and production systems design although little research on how to manage it is presented. The research presented in this paper is based on multiple sources of data, mainly gathered by means of three case studies conducted at two companies from the automotive industry. The difficulties are categorised in terms of whether or not they are related to a concurrent engineering context. The approaches are categorised with regard to whether or not they focus on difficulties related to a concurrent engineering context, and whether or not they focus on the materials supply systems designers and their work.