MANUFACTURING GLOBAL OPERATIONS DESIGN: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY AIDED BY SIMULATION TOOLS

Abstract

The need to compete in a global economy has forced companies to internationalize their operations. The design and configuration of purchasing, anufacturing, supplying and distributing global operations become a key strategy to align operations strategy with business strategy.The operations strategy formulation must respond to manufacturing location facility, supply strategy, facility strategic role in the global network design, integration or fragmentation of productive and logistic operations, and suppliers and distribution network design in order to carry out the internationalization process in a successful and reliable way. This paper focuses on one of the most complex decisions such as the supply strategy. The authors based on a case study developed with a manufacturer of electric generators for the wind sector, they propose a methodology supported on the use of simulation tools such as DGRAI and discrete event simulation to solve the supply strategy problem. The method and proposed techniques utilization allow increasing sales due to the implementation speed and a better service quality to strategic customers.