Axiomatic Design as a Tool to Develop a Global Production Strategy in Transportation Industry

Abstract

Manufacturers of almost every industry sector face the challenge to develop and constantly adapt their production strategy according to a changing political and economic environment. A well aligned production strategy is the basis to satisfy customer demands, create competitive advantage and therefore expand the market share. In an increasingly globalized economy, global production strategies and the design of global value chains become more and more important to gain sustainable competitive advantage in global markets. This is, to a large extend, a management challenge that inheres a change in strategy in terms of network design, process technology and manufacturing, leadership, and training, and forecasting and planning. To master these challenges Axiomatic Design (AD) was used to derive concept design parameters based on the analysis of customer attributes (CAs). Coming from the definition of internal stakeholders of the production strategy, CAs were defined and matched with system and company internal constraints. The remaining CAs were grouped into a set of functional requirements and broken down to an implementable set of design guidelines for a global production strategy. The results show a global production strategy approach based on five independent pillars while the decomposition allows to point out important interdependencies and helps to schedule an implementation process of the strategy.