Development of a design and evaluation framework for supplier cities

For companies pursuing opportunities by expanding manufacturing to new markets, one major challenge is unavoidable: identifying and developing capable, local suppliers. In developing markets suppliers often lack the cutting edge technology, processes, and management methodologies driving the world's best businesses. The ability to identify and develop, relocate or build suppliers with World-Class capability becomes a competitive advantage. This thesis discusses the state of the art in Industrial Conglomerations (including Industrial Clusters and Supplier Cities) as well as their benefits and limitations. To analyze the potential opportunity for manufacturing firms considering supplier cities, we have developed a technical, operational, and financial framework for considering the opportunity and making key decisions about structure, location, and included processes. The framework includes a discussion regarding process selection based on an analysis of critical technical issues at each manufacturing step. This analysis considers the relationship of process capability to overall product performance and ultimately to product competitiveness.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Authors dc:creator

• Mellein, Jason Antoine
• Shockley, Daniel Allen

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Hardt and Richard Locke.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• Mechanical Engineering.
• Sloan School of Management.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/69200

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/69200