Strategic Supply Chain Management in Process Industries : An Application to Specialty Chemicals Production Network Design

More and more often practitioners in process industry have to adapt their global production networks to changes in the competitive environment. A majority of the supply network design models proposed by academia does not sufficiently capture the economic and technical questions that have to be resolved. This work seeks to provide the necessary operations research decision support tools. It builds on the example of specialty chemicals industry, which faces a strong increase of competitive pressure and historically grown production networks that typically lack a coherent design strategy. Decision makers have to define a global production network re-design strategy. Therefore, the book proposes a planning process split into the two phases: global production network optimization and individual site selection. To support the former a comprehensive Mixed-Integer Linear Programming model is proposed while an approach based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process is suggested for the latter. Findings from a case study demonstrate the applicability of OR methods to real-world production networks.