Facility networks

As Luss (1982, p. 935) points out, capacity planning in multi-facility networks is closely related to network design problems. 

Cohen MA, Moon S (1990) Impact of Production Scale Economies, Manufacturing Complexity, and Transportation Costs on Supply Chain Facility Networks. Journal of Manufacturing and Operations Management 3 269-292... 

Those physical and information technology facilities, networks, services and assets which, if disrupted or destroyed, have a serious impacton the health, safety, security or economic well-being of citizens or the effective functioning of governments (European Commission 2004). 

Monitor Strategic International Facility Networks Panos Kouvelis Q>nd Charles L. Munson... 

USING A STRUCTURAL EQUATIONS MODELING APPROACH TO DESIGN AND MONITOR STRATEGIC INTERNATIONAL FACILITY NETWORKS... 

Finally, Brush et al (1999) report survey results analyzing actual international plant location decisions among large multinational firms, while various company-specific facility network design issues and decision support systems have been discussed in the applications-oriented literature—see the Breitman and Lucas (1987) work on General Motors, Davis (1993) work on Hewlett-Packard, Amtzen et al. (1995) work on Digital Equipment Corporation, and Cowie (1999) work on RCA. 

Based on intuition and implied in the operations management and international business literature, we propose four framework measures that we believe will have the largest impact on the type of facility network appropriate... 

We hope that the results of this work will stimulate further research into the observed location practice of firms in response to the many complicating factors of the global market environment. For example, the use of operational hedging to account for uncertainty could be incorporated into our models, perhaps by using a scenario approach with discrete probability distributions. Hopefully, future field research will use our facility network classification framework to understand network structure and location practices of firms in various industries. Research explaining differences of facility network structures within an industry will be useful in pointing out other primary levers of such decisions that are potentially not in our current models. Finally, we see an opportunity for consultants to develop industry-specific structural equations based on our approach. 

The market demands, selling prices, and transfer prices are independent of the structure of the facility network. 

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