A Requirement-Oriented Site Role Concept For Factory Planning - A Systematic Review

In today’s globalized world, companies with an international manufacturing network (IMN) rely on the effective distribution of their production activities – as part of their network configuration. In addition, increasing trends towards de-globalization in IMNs confront companies with new challenges in their network design. Therefore, numerous methods for defining network and production strategies, creating network configurations, or coordinating these networks have been developed in recent years. Many of these management approaches use so-called site roles, providing the production sites in the network with a more or less clear allocation of tasks and competencies. This can reduce the complexity within an IMN and help transfer the network strategy into a suitable configuration. However, one shortcoming of existing site role concepts is that they do not consider the specific design of individual plants that is appropriate for the respective role and, therefore, the definite effects on the factory planning method. Thus, site role-related design rules for generating factory layouts can contribute to the mandatory standardization of factory structures in the network. This increases the agility of the production network and enables the management to adapt the network rather quickly in response to a changing strategy or disruptive global conditions. In this article, the specific requirements that a site role concept must fulfill to offer benefits for factory planning in IMN are deduced. As part of a systematic literature review, existing site role concepts are collected and, finally, evaluated against the identified requirements. The paper serves as a basis for further research and the derivation of a corresponding site role concept that meets the defined requirements.