Performance Drivers in Global Production Networks: Analysis of Cause and Effect Relations between Influencing Factors and Performance of Production Sites

Todays manufacturing companies produce goods in globally dispersed production sites in order to profit from differences in factor costs and access new markets. Due to a rising competition on global markets companies need to operate their production sites on a maximum level of performance in terms of efficiency, flexibility, quality and cycle times. The globally dispersed production sites differ in many aspects, which have an influence on their performance. The technological equipment, the size of the site or the complexity of the site's product portfolio can be mentioned exemplarily. Currently companies are not able to assess which factors have an impact on their sites' performance. Beyond that they are missing an approach to identify at which point these factors have a significant impact on the performance. Overall cause and effect relationships between performance drivers and productions site performances are still unexplored. The knowledge of these relations would enable companies to derive design guidelines for the configuration of their production networks. Therefore the aim of this paper is to develop a method to evaluate the impact of performance drivers in global production networks. The approach should enable companies to identify significant corridors of influencing factors of manufacturing sites.