Manufacturing Planning and Control Content Management in Virtual Enterprises Pursuing Mass Customization

While pursuing mass customization (MC) strategies, companies often benefit from cooperating with others. From a customer’s viewpoint, cooperating companies become a virtual enterprise (VE) that produces customer-individual goods. Participants of such a VE have to be extremely flexible in planning and executing their business processes. They have to be coordinated and supported by information systems (IS) that are particularly designed for these tasks. By focusing on the MC supply chain the basic data that is relevant to make successful MC strategies possible is identified. At first, the MC-macro-process, the supporting IS, and the change of roles of the participants during this process will be discussed. Based on this role concept and the common model of a VE for MC, relevant enterprise resource planning (ERP) data is identified.