Supply chain planning in the German automotive industry

Following the evolution in the computer industry, quite a lot of car manufacturers currently intend to move from a built-to-stock oriented production of standardized cars towards a customized built-to-order (BTO) production. In the premium segment of Germany's automotive industry, the share of customized BTO cars traditionally is comparatively high. Nevertheless, German car manufacturers have spent a lot of efforts in recent years to further increase this share in order to realize short delivery times, high delivery reliability and a fast responsiveness. Surprisingly, comprehensive overviews of the short- and mid-term planning landscape of car manufacturers cannot be found in the scientific literature. Thus, the first part of the paper discusses supply chain planning, as traditionally established in the premium segment of the German automotive industry, and reviews methods of Operations Research (OR) that are able to support the various planning tasks involved. In the second part, the major change in strategy, currently to be observed in the German automotive industry, is briefly summarized in order to derive its impacts for the planning system and for the respective planning methods. In this way, challenges for a future application of OR methods in the automotive industry can be identified.