What to make at each plant: optimized allocation across a global manufacturing network

The company operates three manufacturing plants located in different countries, with about 12,000 components in scope. Deciding what to make at each plant was not a local choice: every reallocation changed logistics cost, tooling utilization and unit cost at the others, and no plant-by-plant analysis could see that ripple effect.

The relevant inputs, including deliveries, due dates, resources, costs, logistics and tooling, came from different parts of the company. Combining them manually for every allocation decision was unworkable with 12,000 components.

Orion approached the problem globally, bringing into a single formulation the technical and economic fields of analysis that had previously been handled separately: economic location, logistics chain, business strategy and operations management, from part numbers and families through to plants, distributors and customers, covering multiple businesses at once.

The result is a single allocation model: for each component, the three-plant network is now evaluated as one integrated system rather than as three independent decisions.