Practice-oriented methodology for reallocating production technologies to production locations in global production networks

摘要

An increasingly uncertain and dynamic competitive environment is challenging industrial companies nowadays. Against this backdrop, companies are focusing on their core competences. They organize their production in global production networks. While the competitiveness of production networks could be maintained for a long time by optimizing individual production sites, the overall network is increasingly becoming the focus of attention. In particular, the elimination of redundant production technologies offers the potential to exploit economies of scale, to bundle technology-specific competences and to achieve an increase in efficiency. The purely mathematical optimization models disseminated in research are unable to consider all the sub tasks of planning. For this reason, this article proposes a practice oriented methodology for reallocating production technologies to production locations in global production networks. The procedure consists of three phases: the investigation of current production technology-to-site allocation in the production network, the generation and planning of alternative reallocations as well as the evaluation of reallocations. For testing its practical suitability, the procedure is exemplary applied to the global production network for forging processes of a medical device manufacturer.