Manufacturing footprint optimisation: a necessity for manufacturing network in changing business environment

Facing the unpredictable financial crisis, optimising the footprint can be the biggest and most important transformation a manufacturer can undertake. In order to realise the optimisation, fundamental understanding on manufacturing footprint is required. Different elements of manufacturing footprint have been investigated independently in the existing literature. In this paper, for the purpose of relationship exploration between different elements, manufacturing footprints of three industrial companies are traced historically. Based on them, four reasons for the transformation of manufacturing footprint are identified and further classified into enablers and drivers. A road map is also shown to depict the detailed path of the transformation of a manufacturing footprint. Taking these as a guide, short-term and long-term solutions to optimise manufacturing footprint are proposed.