Composite Solutions for Consumer-Driven Supply Chains

Abstract

Global economy migrates from vertically integrated enterprises towards specialized enterprises interoperating to create end-to-end value to customers. Value nets, emerging around the value proposition of a platform offer, have become the centerpiece of collaborative value creation, altering the traditional supply chain approach, while keeping pace with changing customer demands. This modular approach allows for sophisticated, cost efficient composite solutions provided by dynamic ‘consumerdriven supply chains’. We characterize these supply chains ‘consumer-driven’ as the services complementing the platform offer are built based on loosely coupled supply chains of services, provided by an ‘open pool of autonomous service providers’, which we will refer to as ‘service-enabling ecosystem’. In this paper, we describe the challenges platform operators face in the light of consumer-driven supply chains. In particular, we focus on how to orchestrate a complex self-organizing service-enabling ecosystem, on how to steer a continuous service supply and explicitly, on how to ensure sustainable service quality optimization. Based on a conceptual model of feedback control, which we introduce in pursuit of the methods of control engineering, we propose a managerial control process for service-enabling ecosystems as well as a corresponding typology of control mechanisms for improved consumer-driven service supply on top of a platform.

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