Company-Specific Plant Roles

The interaction between a firm’s headquarters and its plants is crucial to ensuring that the manufacturing network generates a competitive advantage. The concept of plant roles, first introduced by Ferdows (1989), is a suitable tool to facilitate the headquarters-plant relationship. Although many articles deal with Ferdows’s plant roles, hardly any can be found that discusses how companies can design and deploy their own plant roles. Thus, this article proposes a step-by-step guide for network managers.