How does your future Supply Chain look like?

More and more companies use global procurement markets, serve global sales markets and have the opportunity to establish locations for the production, assembly and storage of products worldwide. The question of a suitable network design is a strategic one and crucial for the success of companies. Against the backdrop of providing their customers with high-quality products in a flexible manner, while keeping costs low and ensuring a high level of supply security at the same time, the company networks consisting of their own locations and external partners must be configured in a targeted manner. In the context of network design, the following aspects have to be considered:  

• Where should production and assembly plants be located?
• What should be the level of the production and distribution network?
• Which production steps are carried out at which plant?
• Which capacities at the plants are reasonable considering the future development strategy of the company?
• Which suppliers supply which production and assembly plants?
• Which production plants supply which assembly plants?
• Which assembly plants supply which warehouses or markets?
• How robust are the planning alternatives with regard to possible future scenarios and uncertainties?

The design of logistic networks is very challenging. Each potential own and partner location needs to be evaluated in its current and expected future characteristics with regard to different factors. These factors include amongst others quality, transport costs, labor costs, availability of specialists, legal situation and political stability, availability and diversity of suppliers, construction and rental costs, custom regulations and subsidies.

Against this background, only a systematic and methodical approach can be effective in identifying suitable network configurations, improving mature supply chain structures and avoiding cost-intensive planning errors.

We offer the following services to our customers:

• Analysis of existing network structures and identification of fields of activity
• Conception of alternative design scenarios for logistics networks considering company specific target criteria such as delivery time, quality, costs, flexibility or customer proximity
• Simulation based evaluation of the future viability of current and alternative network designs in all logistic phases (procurement, production and distribution logistic)
  

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