REQUIREMENTS UPON HUMAN COMPETENCES IN GLOBALLY DISTRIBUTED MANUFACTURING

Today, enterprises operate in a tremendously competitive environment c haracterised by a number of changed business conditions. These compris e the trend to global and transparent markets, the rise of mass custom isation, and reduced product life cycles. Competence in the optimal us e of information and communication technologies supporting a global co operation of enterprises will be a future key to industrial countries remaining competitive in both the race for bringing new products to ma rket and in sustaining a profitable presence in the market. However, o ld production management paradigms and the related production engineer ing curricula are limited by their single-site, internal orientation, based on the assumption of a predictable external environment in which suppliers and customers are dealt with on a transactional basis rathe r than in relationships for mutual benefit. The emergence of a more gl obal economy in both supply and demand, coupled with ever-increasing a vailability of new information and communication technologies, calls f or a consequent application of these technologies and the development of related qualification concepts. To fill this gap, a project called 'Methods and Technologies to Support Global Manufacturing' has been la unched at the University of Bremen. After discussing the industrial ch ange towards globally distributed manufacturing, the requirements on t he education of production and economic engineers will be derived. The overall approach of this interdisciplinary project will be presented in this paper. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.