Design Guidelines for the Strategic Design of Sustainable Production Networks

Manufacturing companies operate in global production networks to allocate value creation processes to globally distributed sites. These complex structures ensure competitive advantages and thus the corporate and production strategy. The implications of sustainability requirements increase this complexity, with conflicting goals and adapted network structures in particular changing the design of global production networks. To address this deficit, this paper develops a method for the development of strategic design guidelines by adapting the methods of the Design-for-X approach from product development. The developed method integrates the network capabilities to be achieved and thus transfers the network strategy into the network design by defining guidelines along the allocation decisions and analyzing their interactions. This method is applied on the basis of a case study, which demonstrates the interactions between the sustainability dimensions.