Complexity drivers in manufacturing companies: a literature review

Abstract

Increasing complexity in manufacturing companies has been one of the biggest issues during the last years. Companies in high-technology marketplaces are confronted with technology innovation, dynamic environmental conditions, changing customer requirements, globalization of markets and competitions as well as market uncertainty. Manufacturing companies can't escape these trends, which induce an increasing amount of complexity. Reasons for this phenomenon are internal and external sources of complexity so-called complexity drivers. Identifying, analyzing and understanding complexity drivers are the first step for complexity management's development and implementation. Complexity management is a strategic issue for companies to be competitive. The purpose of this literature review is to provide a general overview regarding complexity drivers in manufacturing companies. The different definitions of complexity drivers are described, and a new overall definition of complexity drivers is presented. Furthermore, the existing approaches for complexity driver's identification, operationalization and visualization are identified and specified. For complexity driver's clustering, a superior classification system was developed based upon existing classification systems in the literature. The literature review was done by systematically analyzing and collecting existing literature and reveals gaps according to methodology and issue. Existing literature reviews are only focused on specific issues, such as logistics or supply chain management, and do not point out the applied research methodology in detail. A general overview regarding complexity drivers in manufacturing companies and along the value chain does not exist yet.

Complexity Drivers in Digitalized Work Systems: Implications for Cooperative Forms of Work

“…All these aspects can only be considered, if there is a fundamental knowledge of complexity drivers in a work system. In this article, the understanding of the term "complexity driver" is based on the general definition of Vogel and Lasch [40], which they developed from the use of the term in the literature: "Complexity drivers are factors, which influence a system's complexity and company's target achievement. They are responsible for increasing system's [sic] complexity level and help to define the characteristics or the phenomenon of a system's complexity.…”

“…They are responsible for increasing system's [sic] complexity level and help to define the characteristics or the phenomenon of a system's complexity. Complexity drivers are influenced by one another, that is by internal or external drivers, and cannot be reduced completely to another one" ( [40], p. 18).…”

“…As another result of their systematic literature research, Vogel and Lasch [40] show that there is a multitude of different approaches to identify and classify complexity drivers. They identify complexity drivers with a systematic literature research procedure and employ a quantitative frequency analysis of mentioned complexity drivers.…”

“…The rectangles in Figure 3 represent one complexity driver category that is further subdivided into numerous complexity drivers. Detailed descriptions of the assigned complexity drivers are presented in [40].…”

Managing Manufacturing Complexity Drivers on Performance – An Initial Study

“…In general, the manufacturing complexity drivers can be distinguished between internal and external factors and so-called complexity drivers [10]. To gain an understanding of the complexity, these external and internal drivers need to be identified first and their dependency on products and processes needs to be described subsequently [11].…”