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

Target System Based Design of Quality Control Strategies in Global Production Networks

Increasing globalization drives companies to produce in global networks, where each site acts autonomously according to its individual target system, influenced by specific location factors or its defined specialization. Despite distributed value creation processes, the overall production quality must be ensured. Hence, a simulation-based approach is presented, which allows for designing an optimal across-site quality control strategy by evaluating different quality measures depending on individual target systems of different sites. At first, a categorization of quality measures and an applicable target system model are presented. Secondly, a simulation approach is described to evaluate implemented measures according to defined performance indicators

Estratégia de operações das empresas sociais: recursos, práticas e competências

In the last years, social enterprises have emerged as an important element in the organisational landscape and in the response to social challenges. These organisations, also acknowledged in the literature as hybrid organisations, are characterized essentially by a dual organisational identity, combining social and economic aims under the same organisational structure. This duality of objectives that characterizes social enterprises challenges the existing knowledge on operations strategy, as it raises questions about the objectives to which the operations function must respond, as well as about the existing resources and practices at the operational level which lead to the development of distinctive operational capabilities. Thus, the main objective of this research work is to understand how social configure their operations strategy. In order to meet this objective, it was conducted an exploratory study, adopting a mixed methods research approach. In a first instance, a taxonomy was developed aiming to characterize social enterprises in Portugal according to their organisational identity. Afterwards, case studies were conducted in social enterprises with different characteristics to understand how they configure their resources and practices in order to develop distinctive capabilities. The results suggest the existence of four social enterprise profiles, exhibiting different levels of commitment towards social and market aspects, as well as differences in terms of mission characteristics and performance. Regarding their operations strategy, community engagement is identified as one of the operational performance dimensions of such organisations. However, they tend to combine multiple operational performance dimensions as a response to conflicting demands. Motivated by resources constraints and the benefits associated with the existence of a collaborative environment, social enterprises adopt a greater diversity of practices aiming the development of improvement and cooperation capabilities. Their specificities also lead to the development of the mobilization of resources capability and the openness capability.Nos últimos anos, tem-se assistido à emergência de empresas sociais como um importante elemento no panorama organizacional e na resposta aos desafios sociais. Estas organizações, também reconhecidas na literatura como organizações híbridas, caracterizam-se essencialmente por uma dupla identidade organizacional, combinando objetivos sociais e objetivos económicos dentro da mesma estrutura organizacional. Esta dualidade de objetivos que caracteriza as empresas sociais desafia o conhecimento existente no domínio das estratégias de operações, uma vez que levanta questões sobre os objetivos aos quais a função de operações deve responder, bem como os recursos e as práticas existentes ao nível operacional que levam ao desenvolvimento de competências operacionais distintivas. Assim sendo, o principal objetivo deste trabalho de investigação é compreender como as empresas sociais configuram a sua estratégia de operações. Para tal, foi conduzido um estudo exploratório, adotando uma abordagem de investigação multi-método. Numa primeira instância, foi desenvolvida uma taxonomia com o objetivo de caracterizar as empresas sociais em Portugal de acordo com a sua identidade organizacional. Posteriormente, foram conduzidos casos de estudo em empresas sociais com diferentes características para perceber como elas configuram os seus recursos e práticas de forma a desenvolver competências distintivas. Os resultados sugerem a existência de quatro perfis de empresas sociais, que exibem diferentes níveis de comprometimento para com aspetos sociais e de mercado, assim como diferenças ao nível das características da missão e do desempenho. Em relação às suas estratégias de operações, identifica-se o envolvimento da comunidade como uma das dimensões de desempenho operacional deste tipo de organizações. No entanto, elas tendem a combinar várias dimensões de desempenho operacional como resposta à sua dupla identidade. Motivadas pelas restrições ao nível dos recursos e os benefícios associados à existência de um ambiente colaborativo, as empresas sociais adotam uma maior diversidade de práticas que visam o desenvolvimento das competências operacionais de melhoria dos processos e cooperação. As suas especificidades levam também ao desenvolvimento das competências de mobilização de recursos e de abertura.Programa Doutoral em Engenharia e Gestão Industria