The future of manufacturing configuration: priorities and challenges for Danish multinationals

The purpose of the paper is to identify and discuss the most recent challenges facing organization of operations in Western companies. The paper is based on a series of workshops with 14 Danish companies. The identified challenges include: establishing operations at multiple locations, increasing knowledge intensity and level of complexity of these operations, growing coordination needs, and the issues of internal competition in the operations networks and increasingly challenging the role of the home base operation. As these trends are relatively new, the industrial development patterns and individual firms' ability to compete on the basis of an increasingly global manufacturing network remain unclear.