Many companies focus on their core competencies and work together in collaborations to satisfy the customers requirements and gain sustained competitive advantage (Seifert, 2007). All these developments lead to an increasing complexity that companies must deal with in order to remain competitive. Taking into consideration that business success of every company is based on the quality of its business processes (Linß, 2002), it can be said that business success of a collaborative network is based on the quality of business processes of every collaboration partner. Looking at industrial companies, production processes play an important role through the direct value adding to products. The outcome of this is that the quality of a product is directly influenced by the quality of the production processes (Brinksmeier, 1991). The trend of todays products becoming more and more optimized leads to a consistent exploitation of achievable product properties. At the same time, it has to be secured that these desired product properties can be achieved through the production processes. Therefore, a detailed understanding of the production processes and their influence on products becomes progressively more important.
