Companies who get their Manufacturing Footprint Strategy right could be leaders for a generation, those that get it wrong may well fade from view. Andrew Allcock talked to the authors of a major new study. Manufacturing Footprint Strategy -making the right things in the right places - is not simply a glamourised version of outsourcing, offshoring, restructuring or of locating production in emerging markets, emphasises the study's author, Institute for Manufacturing, Cambridge (see box, opposite). It is a new approach to the design and configuration of manufacturing plants across the world; the goal being a co-ordinated network of operations working collectively, rather than individually, at their best.
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