Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IMLTechnological innovations and market-driven changes are forthcoming challenges to companies worldwide entailing a need to empower organizations to adapt their supply chains to future settings.
Various internal and external factors include increasing customer-induced diversity of variants, climate change or resource scarcity, and accelerated technological developments. These factors offer opportunities but also comprise risks, which European companies in the manufacturing, distribution and logistics sectors have to deal with. To remain competitive in the future, it will be necessary to reconfigure the supply chains in terms of collaboration and organization as well as to transform the supply chains from a competitive cost approach to supply chains, which generate the best added-value for the customer.
The aim of the project is to enable a cross-industry and cross-technology initiative at European level focusing on the interaction between production and logistics. Its intention is the identification and prioritization of future topics for research and innovation within the scope of supply chain management. For that purpose, trends in different sectors are projected into future scenarios addressing identified key challenges and chances on political, economic, social, technological and environmental level.
The project will develop a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) combining the efforts of different communities such as EFFRA, SPIRE, ALICE and other ICTs to enable an interdisciplinary and cross-industry projection for the EU.
