A cooperation model and demand-oriented ICT infrastructure for SME development and production networks in the field of microsystem technology

More customer demand than ever are looking for one stop shop development and production services provided by SME cooperation. The necessary boundary conditions n organisational level can be also adressed by SMEs, as long as these are willing to intensively cooperate in a new quality of intensity and trust. An appropriate approach for this can be the clan cooperation. The modified MST clan cooperation concept of jointly a marketing and project management of equal SME partners is • suitable for companies that are in the process of entering new markets • suitable for smaller specialized companies with limited marketing/sales capacities,• not suitable for companies with a focus on large scale /automotive market Rigid and strictly structured IT-infrastructures are not an appropriate solution for this type of cooperation. Furthermore a demand oriented infrastructure has to be modular and flexible, where "flexibility" for an SME network in the context of MST has to address two topics: It has to address the specific requirements of a parallel product development and process adaption, which can be solved by a flexible process model based or an iterative development approach having been described in this paper. In addition it has to deal with restrictions in information exchange coming from the heterogeneous Information technology at the partner sites. To overcome these limitations, a demand oriented, EAI based approach supporting a cross company information exchange has been introduced. © 2010 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.