Facilitating of downstream customer orientation strategies for manufacturing businesses through state of the art data science such as interconnected production systems, big data and the Internet of Things

Abstract

How to grow and earn more money with the existing products, as production and cost optimization is almost used to full capacity? And how to benefit from the fast developing digital evolution? These are two of the most critical out of several challenges today’s companies are faced with. On one hand, the importance of customer orientation by concentrating on downstream activities is often disregarded due to concentration on upstream production strategies. Therefore, the paper shall outline possibilities and tools for manufacturing companies to concentrate on their customers’ needs by downstream activities. On the other hand, digital technology and data science made enormous steps in the past years and they are continuing in a tremendous pace. These offers a huge potential of enhancements for businesses, using these latest technological accomplishments. These are, just to name the most famous, the so called Internet of Things, big data and interconnectivity of production environments. Introducing and sharpening these often blurry and interchanged names will be one important task of this paper as well. The core question is which one of them are – or could be – useful and add value to the defined main goal: customer orientation by concentrating on downstream activities. This means the goal is to summarize an evaluation of current possibilities and to give recommendations for businesses, how they can approach these options and develop strategies. Ideally and finally, suggestions how to implement them into their companies are given.