Individualization of Goods and Services: Towards a Logistics Knowledge Infrastructure for Agile Supply Chains

Our research is directed towards agile supply chains enabling enterprises to quickly respond to individual customer demand. From this perspective, agility encompasses three dimensions of adaptivity: space, time, and economy. Supply chain agility can be achieved by exploiting the most fundamental resource of any enterprise: knowledge. Studying supply chains, we regard all their tiers, participants, and potential relationships, as the search space for fulfilling individual customer demand. We study supply chains from a knowledge-based coordination perspective and regard logistics as the guiding conceptualization. The contribution of this research is a logistics knowledge infrastructure. We report about applying parts of this infrastructure to coordination problems in three selected case studies.