• capabilities
• decentralization
• decision making
• factory planning
• international
• strategic

Due to the variety and speed at which factors influencing a factory change, a factory can quickly lose its competitiveness. A key example of problem which needs to be addressed is that information about resources within a factory, is scattered or missing. As a consequence, for the correct configuration of the factory planning task, information has to be well managed. This will ensure the necessary strategic alignment of the project with company strategy and then, one level deeper, between centralized and decentralized planning departments. Moreover, it could be difficult to find and integrate information when it is stored by different people in different application. For example, geometrical models of machines and buildings could be saved in different application formats. This makes difficult to integrate geometrical models for a whole system. A non-streamlined factory planning process or a mistake in factory layout design can delay a project by months, and a small error in geometrical model integration can result in a direct cost increase.
For all those reasons, especially when it comes to factory and production planning processes, it is extremely important to follow a strategic approach. The optimal management of both the horizontal and vertical information flows is a requirement for the best integration of the information in the FP environment and, as a consequence, for the maximisation of the FP process efficiency. A clear production strategy is crucial for being able to derive the correct measures for factory and production planning, and for optimizing production efficiently and in line with company's goals. This is true not only for large corporations, but especially for SMEs. In fact, while factory planning (as a project) is getting a more frequent process, it needs to be aligned with company strategies. This means that the optimal allocation of competencies, responsibilities and resources needs to reflect company’s policies, mission and needing.
This present research project aims at developing a model which depicts how to allocate and assign competencies in globally acting planning networks and how to organise the planning teams accordingly. Moreover, information on how to build up viable organization structures for a global factory planning need to be considered for the optimal configuration of the previous model. A step-by-step model for the organisation of international factory planning which enables the optimal configuration of the planning and scheduling process depicts the result of the project.