ICT support in One-of-a-Kind production: a case study research in the 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). At the same time, high quality level and competitive price represent the main drivers to attract new customers and respond to low cost countries competitors. In this context, an effective management of industrial processes, along with an efficient ICT support, may ease companies in optimizing project lead times, minimizing costs and gaining competitive advantage. For these reasons, the main aims of this paper are to investigate strenghts and weakness of the main OKP business processes, analyze their ICT support level and identify levers for improvement. Based on the value chain proposed by Porter (1985), we first identified the primary and the support activities that characterize OKP-based companies. Thus, we carried out 21 case studies in Italian companies producing special machines for several industries. The choice of the sample was based on various considerations such as the relevance of this kind of companies in Italy in terms of presence on the territory, overall turnover and employment level, as well as the peaks of excellence reached by many of them. From an ICT standpoint, preliminary results highlight the high diffusion of stand-alone applications in this industry, along with a low level of integration among different software. Further analysis evidence the project management area, in terms of planning, monitoring and cost control, as a potential field of substantial improvement both in terms of ICT support and managerial policies.