ICT support in One-of-a-Kind Production context: an empirical research in the Italian Special Purpose Machines Industry

Nowadays, global competition pushes manufacturing companies to continuously increase the customization of their products up to reach the One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP), where each product is designed and manufactured based on customer requirements (Hong et al. 2010). These companies supply high value and customised products, with deep and complex product structure. OKP companies usually have to adapt managerial paradigms, business models and ICT supporting tools generally developed for other (i.e. the repetitive) sectors. For these reasons, the main aims of our paper are to investigate strengths and (in particular) weakness of the main OKP business processes, analyze their ICT support level and identify levers for improvement. We carried out 21 case studies in Italian companies producing special machines. Based on the value chain proposed by Porter (1998), we first identified the primary processes and the support activities that characterize OKP-based companies. Preliminary results highlight that three fundamental tasks such as project management, planning and cost control, are not well formalized in our sample. Our research will focus on the creation of a framework that could define and link each other the main processes highlighted before in order to obtain a sort of guideline useful for re-engineering the processes and start the design of a new integrated ICT support for OKP companies.