The Global Production Networks newsletter provides you occasionally with the latest information about our research topics and upcoming projects.
Global Production Networks

Our science-based production network management approach provides the tools and methods for all our consulting projects. It has proven its usefulness and applicability in our assessment and optimization of more than 65 production networks.
Our experts and consultants are keen to apply their experience from research and practice projects to your production network. You may profit from their knowledge through detailed assessments, benchmarks, and tailored workshops. In an individual project, we guide you through your global production strategy elaboration, your production set-up configuration, and your coordination of dispersed production sites towards effective and efficient network management.
Read more about our consulting projects in the area of production networks.

Our proven benchmarking process supports you and your company in identifying improvement potentials in the fields of global production management, digitalization of manufacturing and operations management in general. Together with other companies, you constitute a consortium that defines the exact topic and benchmarking questions according to your needs.
We organize the whole process including questionnaire design, survey evaluation and site visits at successful practices. Thereby you learn in a practice-driven and scientifically-validated way how others succeeded in solving your problems.
Read more about our benchmarking projects.

As a university institute, we are not only eager to contribute to real-world applications in companies but also to advance the scientific frontier. However, since our research focus is on global production networks, we collaborate with such companies for research purposes as well.
Both industrial companies and public organizations fund our research projects. In general, these projects do not directly generate additional revenue or cost savings for collaborating companies. Instead, they support them in understanding their decisions in a better way and in laying the groundwork for future initiatives and optimizations. Take the chance to shape the future of global production networks together with us.
Read more about our research projects in collaboration with industry.

In 2022 we started our Global Production Academy in collaboration with the KIT. With two leading research institutes led by Prof. Friedli (St.Gallen) and Prof. Lanza (Karlsruhe) and currently 7 multinational companies, we discuss the current challenges within global production networks and work on solutions, commonly.
Each of our exchange days includes a unique exchange between practitioners and researchers consisting of keynote presentations, discussions, workshops, shopfloor tours, and network sessions. The program is complemented by a get-together on a respective evening before the exchange to get to know each other personally.
Read more about our Global Production Academy.

News & Projects
View all our news and projects in our archive.

The final conference on the 1st of March in Aachen was the last get-together in our Consortium Benchmarking Artificial Intelligence in Operations.

The final conference closed the consortium benchmarking global productions strategies 2022. Prof. Dr. Thomas Friedli and Prof. Dr. Klaus Möller gave insights from research with their keynote speeches. Also, the five visits at Dätwyler, Festo, IMS:Gear, Schott and Kuka were summarized and discussed.

Our fourth and last meeting of our Global Production Academy 2022 took place at CLAAS in Harsewinkel this week.
As a globally leading agricultural machinery manufacturer CLAAS shared current insights into its production and its risk mitigation strategy for the global production network. In joint discussion rounds with our consortium together with Herrenknecht, CLAAS, FACC, HOMAG, MTU Aero Engines, Balluff, PERI and our research partner the wbk Institute of Production Science (wbk-KIT) we could collect and define valuable successful practices
Once again, we would like to express our sincere thanks to all participating companies for their exciting insights, our great discussions and openness in all four meetings. We are already looking forward to continuing our discussions in 2023.
If you would like to be part of our Global Production Academy 2023, feel free to reach out to our GPA Team!

Last Friday, the third meeting of the Global Production Academy, founded together with the wbk Institute of Production Science (wbk-KIT), took place. HOMAG, a leading manufacturer of woodworking machinery, shared exciting insights into its production strategy and its data-based approach for product allocation in the network. Afterwards, different approaches to design the production network were discussed together with the experts from Herrenknecht AG, CLAAS, FACC AG, HOMAG, MTU Aero Engines, Balluff EMEA and PERI In particular, the handling of uncertainty in the business environment and the consideration of soft decision criteria played a major role. We are already looking forward to deepening these discussions in the fourth meeting at the CLAAS on the topic of risk mitigation.