Planning support for the design of quality control strategies in global production networks

The increasing globalization forces manufacturing companies to organize their production in global networks, which include company internal sites as well as locations of external partners and suppliers. Each site in this network has an assigned strategic role according to the specific location factors, i.e. qualification level of employees or available process technology, and the defined specialization of each site, i.e. regarding served market, final product or realized processes. This role defines an individual target system that considers at least the dimensions cost, quality and time. Each site acts autonomously according to the target system. Since it is crucial for the success of the company to ensure the demanded quality of the final product with minimal cumulated quality costs and lead times, the quality control strategy for the production network has to be designed according to the target systems of the individual sites. The presented article describes an approach, which enables globally operating companies to efficiently plan their efforts for their quality control measures in their respective production network taking the specific site roles into account. In a first step, a value-stream-based methodology is presented, which visualizes quality characteristics as well as related quality inspections in the production process chain and which identifies potentials in the quality control strategy across locations. In a second step a simulation approach is used to evaluate the effects of different quality measures considering dynamic influencing factors and individual target systems, so that the optimal quality control strategy for the production network can be identified. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.