An integrated decision support system for global manufacturing co-ordination in the automotive industry

Global manufacturing increasingly faces decision challenges of how to better manage the dependencies between different activities that take place either locally or across different locations. Coordination decision making not only requires the right information to be provided in the right place at the right time, but also requires the right level of support from models for decision analysis and decision evaluation. Furthermore, the alignment of coordination decisions with a global firm's global environment and its operations performance has been identified as crucial to the firm's success, but remains a challenge to decision makers. This paper proposes an integrated decision support system (IDSS) that can facilitate manufacturing managers to make more efficient and effective global coordination decisions. A combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis and assessment functions has been provided through the system's four key components (a Global Context Modeller, a Multi-Criteria Scoring Modeller, a Configurator and a Coordinator). The evaluation of the decision system has been undertaken through a case study within the automotive industry, which demonstrates the applicability of the system to providing decision support for realistic global manufacturing coordination problems. 1. Introduction Over the last three decades, along with the phenomenon of globalisation, manufacturing management has been experiencing a paradigm shift from local through international to global level (Meixell and Gargeya, 2005). This paradigm shift has triggered many industries to innovate the ways they deliver their products through globally networked production systems. A direct consequence to the automotive industry is a fundamental change to their organisational structure. Specifically, it caused the recent emergence of a new structure and configuration of manufacturing networks (Trappey et al, 2007). Traditionally, manufacturing networks were organised in tiers (Mondragon and Lynos, 2008; Veloso and Kumar, 2002). For example, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) would design and assemble the cars. First tiers in the manufacturing network would manufacture and supply components directly to the automaker (e.g. the fuel pump). Second tiers would produce some of the simpler individual parts that would be included in a component manufactured by a first tier (e.g. the housing of the fuel pump), and third and fourth tiers would mostly supply raw materials. This relatively simple configuration required less coordination effort across the manufacturing network, because the majority of the interactions and communications only happened between the two consecutive tiers. However, this simple configuration no longer fits the actual structure of the industry in today's globalisation environment (Doran et al, …