As an EMS service provider SME, the company often has to grapple with the prejudice that it is a “simple contract manufacturer”. Yet, the standards set for the service business, especially nowadays with inexorably progressing digitalisation, are becoming increasingly varied and flexible and therefore more sophisticated and above all more complex. CEO Dr Ralf Hasler sees the Lacon Group as a fully-fledged product realiser with its own development and production services as well as an independent distribution business:
We service the complete bandwidth of customers, from the startup through to the major international corporation, along the entire added value chain. Accordingly, coordination between the production processes is becoming increasingly important and the degree of complexity rises steadily.
To give the 115 companies at the Smart Variant CON 2019 in Berlin, the largest event for variant complexity managers in D/A/CH, a deeper insight into the modern challenges of an EMS service provider, in his “complexity management in a low-volume high-mix environment” case study, Hasler posed and discussed the following fascinating questions:- What are the particular features of complexity management in a service business?
- What are suitable approaches for this?
- How are the process costs optimised throughout the entire order cycle?
During the 2.5-day event, more than 200 variant, complexity and product managers as well as configuration experts also exchanged ideas on other interesting topics, for example, "new, effective approaches to strategy development in variant management” or discussed the "effective automation of variant management".
