The global financial crisis has significantly impacted the automotive industry with reduced supply of credit to industry exposing their process inefficiencies and reduced credit to consumers reducing sales. Firms are restructuring, with some seeking government financial support, but the industry...

Build to Order [BTO] refers to a demand driven production approach where the majority of products and components are scheduled and built in response to a confirmed order received for it from a final customer. This paper develops an Engineering Systems approach to strategic adoption of a BTO...

Vehicle manufacturers build the majority of vehicles to a sales forecast and links between production and final customer orders are tenuous. A greater percentage of build to order (BTO) vehicle production may offer the European automotive industry a competitive edge. The EU and industry funded...

Faced with shorter product lifecycles and increased cost of capital, companies can no longer afford the capital outlay for new facilities which may become underutilised as processes improve over the first few years of operation. Outsourcing production capacity can remove this uncertainty....