Global Operations

The study of globally operating companies is one of our four main research interests and covers a wide range of topics, such as strategy, facility location, distribution, purchasing, inventory control, or the design and improvement of processes. While we do research on these topics, we apply different perspectives taking among others economic, organizational, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects into consideration. Typical questions we pose and aim to answer are for example: Where should a manufacturer produce what? How to improve the performance of a global production network? Or, how does national culture affect a manufacturing plant?

In order to answer the first question, we investigate the re- and offshoring behavior of manufacturing companies and try to understand their motives. Theoretically, there can be many reasons for changing the production site. A few of the most important ones are reducing costs, taxes or export lead times, providing a better customer service, and facilitating the access to knowledge or other resources. However, in most cases the change of a production site involves high investments and risks, eventually causing trade-offs that our research aims to elucidate.

In another study, we work with a manufacturing firm that operates more than 30 production facilities all over the world. The goal of this study is to find successful ways of introducing an improvement program into such a global production network.