Global Manufacturing – Challenges and Solutions

The design and the operation of global supply chains has become a new challenge for many production enterprises, additional to the existing problems in everyday practice.

However, with increasing success followed up by growth the weak points often show up in the order execution process. This becomes apparent in a bad delivery performance, increasing inventories and frequent special actions.

The consequences are that the essential business processes, product design, process design, production and order fulfillment must be reviewed in a comprehensive cooperative process. The classical single step order partially turns around due to the market priority of fulfilling customer wishes within short delivery times. Local optimization in a single enterprise can even be counterproductive.

The requirements for products, processes, production equipment and logistics in global supply chains require pliable solutions. These solutions have to take into account costs for material and added values at the respective production place, local conditions concerning knowledge and local content, currency relations between production locations and markets, commercial law terms, as well as protection from imitation.

The paper describes the challenge more from a scenario point of view, giving first solutions from industrial practice and formulating new fields of research in the production science.