ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Competing in a global economy is forcing manufacturing organisations to view their worldwide production facilities as a collaborative activity. While mainly relying on their core competencies to improve their performance, in-sourcing, supporting capabilities through collaboration with external service suppliers, is now crucial. Given the increase in such collaborations, the challenge for manufacturing organisations and industrial service suppliers is how to successfully integrate the organisation’s core competencies and related production structures with the in-sourced industrial services. This requires enhancing organisational production performance as well as industrial service performance across organisational boundaries to drive total production performance. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework which enhances the existing scope of intelligent manufacturing by specifically addressing industrial services provided by external suppliers as a part of today’s networked supply chain structures in the manufacturing area. Existing research shows that sourcing industrial services from specialised service organisations establishes complex and unique interdependencies, and links total production performance to the performance of the external service suppliers. Therefore an integrated framework and understanding of service organisations and production interactions, and interdependencies, is crucial for today’s integrated manufacturing organisations to succeed. An appropriate framework is demonstrated and the most relevant research areas to improve the integration of industrial services are proposed.
