Aggregation of Production Data for the Strategic Planning of Global Production Networks

Abstract

In the last two decades a large amount of companies decided to establish productions sites all over the world in order to profit from cost benefits and to gain access to new markets and know-how. This internationalisation trend leads to more and more complex production networks. According to this development managers are confronted with growing intransparencies within their companies due to increasing information asymmetries, growing amount of interfaces and a growing effort for coordination. Nowadays a lot of strategic decisions, e.g. location decisions are made according to someone’s instinct. The usage of a valid data base within decision making processes can improve the quality of taken decisions. There are two ways to establish a sound data base: Manual data gathering, which is always associated with great effort or the usage of “big data”. Technologies from the era “Industrie 4.0” enable companies to gather and store a large amount of data. This data amount can establish transparency to support an objective assessment. Therefore the aim of this paper is the development of a method to aggregate production data systematically to support the strategic planning of global production networks.