3.1.1 Information as a Production Factor

Modern companies are predominantly information-processing systems. It can be assumed today that more than half of value-added costs flow into the production factor of information. Production itself is losing strategic importance more and more rapidly. This manifests itself in, for example, the fact that companies are relocating their production abroad for reasons of cost or are reducing vertical integration without losing their competitiveness or even actually improving it. This is also confirmed by a survey conducted by the VDMA which revealed that a vertical integration of almost 50% in 1998 had shrunk to nearly 40% in 2004, coupled with a simultaneous improvement in position in international competition.

Production is being increasingly replaced by the service capability of offering the market a wide range of product variants to suit customers' wishes while at the same time ensuring a high quality of products and services as well as an excellent delivery service. The features listed here, such as conformity with customer wishes, services, quality, range of product variants, delivery service, are none of them properties which can be secured via the traditional concept of production and thus to be pinned to the product in a measurable manner. They are primarily based on information processing and the ability to have the required information available at the "right time", in the "right quantity" and at the "right place". Command of information management along the value chain is becoming more and more important...