Current State of the Inter-Organizational Information Exchange Strategies of German SME - A Survey

The reliability of well-performing production processes not only depends on internal but also on external factors in the upstream supply chain. Therefore, companies require fast and reliable information exchange with cooperating organizations. We aim to support the industry in improving their communication methods and, therefore, have conducted a survey to capture the current state and needs in this area — addressing inter- instead of the usually surveyed intra-organizational degree of digitalization. In this paper, we outline the main outcomes of our survey. We received 135 evaluable questionnaires from manufacturing companies based in Germany, predominantly from small and medium-sized companies. Based on the responses, we detected that the use of modern methods correlates with the company size. Furthermore, we showed that only a few companies are completely satisfied with their current methods for inter-organizational information exchange. The greatest potential for improvement is seen in standardization and the increase of required resources.