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inTime Project

Welcome to the official website of inTime, an EU-funded FP7 research project

Project introduction

Non-hierarchical production networks are a common environment of today’s manufacturing companies. Each company is facing multiple and dynamic relationships within several networks. This complex situation causes permanent delivery delays. Delayed supplies lead to wasteful turbulences in the entire network and to expensive compensations. For the European manufacturing industry the loss of efficiency is estimated to be 1 billion Euros per year. Besides the costs the missing delivery reliability leads to poor customer satisfaction and increased lead times. The key objective of inTime is to improve delivery reliability in each customer-supplier relationship balancing production in the overall network. In order to foster delivery reliability each supply has to be rewarded according to his delivery performance. Today only a minority of supplies is successfully secured by manual negotiated delivery penalties. Due to the high variation of supplies manual levelling of incentives is a time consuming process. Therefore a fair share of risk between customer and supplier is not transparent. inTime will reach transparency by developing a market based negotiation mechanism rewarding delivery reliability at minimum transaction costs. Key innovation of the project is to establish an electronic market for trading reliability incentives. Besides the development of the market mechanism, the integration into the entire order process requires several novelties which have to be developed simultaneously: - The negotiation mechanism supports a new kind of order prioritisation. To realise this potential new planning and sequencing algorithms are needed. - In order to gain transparency on the criticality of each supply, functions analysing the internal risk and related costs of the required parts have to be developed. - Enabler for inTime is an automated order data communication. To avoid redundant developments inTime will apply the existing communication platform myOpenFactory.

Standardization in inTime

In general, DIN's role as beneficiary of inTime is to foster standardization activities within the research project. During the project duration an analysis and evaluation of existing standards relevant for inTime will be conducted with the aim to draw conclusions concerning technical aspects such as specifications of security requirements as well as requirements for advanced transparent negotiation and collaboration processes.

These efforts will result in the organization of a CWA (CEN Workshop Agreement), a consensus document containing technical specifications, guidance material, best practices or other information developed on European level during CEN Workshops. These CEN workshops present a flexible working platform for rapid elaboration of standards and a meeting place for market stakeholders with the aim to discuss critical standard issues and agree on how to solve them. The CWA document as final result is then available at all CEN member organizations and can be adopted as national document by any national standardization organization. In Germany this document will be published as DIN SPEC (CWA).

The outcomes of these activities will be used for exploitation of the inTime results. The incorporation of further external stakeholders for participating in planning, preparing and implementing a formal European (EN) or International Standard (ISO) might potentially be another beneficial achievement out of this approach.

DIN has applied this standardization support approach to a large number of research projects on the German as well as on the European level before, supporting national and European projects in their exploitation and standardization activities to effectively implement results and make benefits available to all interested parties.

News

The first half of the inTime project has been successfully completed. Within the first 18 month the intime partners have conretised the theoretcial framework of the inTime concept. As one of the main results a web-based benchmarking platform has been developed. The platform commonly shares aggregated key-performance indicators for the delivery reliability of suppliers and certain customer-supplier-relationships. The platform will be implemented within the pilot companies within the next months.

Meetings

The next General Assembly will be held in Munich on September 30.

Standardization in inTime

In general, DIN's role as beneficiary of inTime is to foster standardization activities within the research project.

During the project duration an analysis and evaluation of existing standards relevant for

inTime will be conducted with the aim to draw conclusions concerning technical aspects such as specifications of security requirements as well as requirements for advanced transparent negotiation and collaboration processes.

These efforts will result in the organization of a CWA (CEN Workshop Agreement), a

consensus document containing technical specifications, guidance material, best practices or other information developed on European level during CEN Workshops. These CEN workshops present a flexible working platform for rapid elaboration of standards and a meeting place for market stakeholders with the aim to discuss critical standard issues and agree on how to solve them. The CWA document as final result is then available at all CEN member organizations and can be adopted as national document by any national standardization organization. In Germany this document will be published as DIN SPEC (CWA).

The outcomes of these activities will be used for exploitation of the inTime results. The

incorporation of further external stakeholders for participating in planning, preparing and implementing a formal European (EN) or International Standard (ISO) might potentially be another beneficial achievement out of this approach.

DIN has applied this standardization support approach to a large number of research

projects on the German as well as on the European level before, supporting national and European projects in their exploitation and standardization activities to effectively implement results and make benefits available to all interested parties.

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