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Our department focuses on the business aspects of supply chain management.

A special area of focus in research and teaching is the designing and execution of planning processes in intra-organisational supply chains using IT support from the point of view of the enterprise. Due to the increasing integration of all of an enterprise’s logistics processes, it is no longer enough to concentrate exclusively on production processes or even isolated businesses. Instead, it is necessary to include production planning and control (PPC) in an enterprise’s entire logistics planning process. This planning process is being increasingly replaced or expanded upon by so-called “advanced planning systems (APS)“ in industrial firms. Through the use of optimization methods of operations research, software systems are used to automate and accelerate planning processes, as well as to increase profits and lower costs.

During the past few years, a similar widening of focus has taken place in supply chain management (SCM) with regard to the joint activities of different enterprises. This is especially visible in product design, where, in the context of “postponement”, basic business principles, in particular pertaining to production and logistics, have already impacted the technical design of products with many design possibilities, such as computers, automobiles and mobile phones and will continue to have an impact. In the meanwhile, key concepts, such as “platform strategy” or “integrated production facility” have become popular and influential  terms outside of the realms of industry and higher education.