تحلیل شبکه‌های مجازی تولید جهانی در صنعت هواپیما سازی

The evolution of organizations that work in multinational environments has considerably altered their production strategies. One of the consequences has been the appearance of Global Manufacturing Virtual Networks (GMVNs), which include all kinds of enterprises and production centres and establish a new type of horizontal collaboration and relations between independent companies and even competitors who establish occasional collaborations on projects they could not take on individually. This paper analyses the causes behind the formation of such networks, their strategy, structure, dynamics and evolution, taking into account areas such as strategic intercompany alliances, synchronization of their value and supply chains, their information systems, the cultural aspects of the organizations in question and, finally, their convergence with another of the more relevant future trends in production: mass customization. The proposed model shall be applied to the aeronautical industry which is one of the industries which has developed the GMVN concept. The case study of the engine manufacturer Rolls Royce will provide a better understanding of the evolution of its strategic positioning, as well as the dynamic and fluent nature of its virtual relations. This will demonstrate its effectiveness by clarifying and putting these organizations in perspective and analyzing their evolution over the next few years.

Today, the concept of plant or production centre is becoming increasingly more ambiguous. In many industries, there is growing collaboration between production centres and manufacturing networks that seek to respond to market demands more efficiently and obtain competitive advantages in an increasingly globalized environment. In some industries, such as the aeronautical industry, the electronics industry or the car industry, there is mention of Global Manufacturing Virtual Networks (GMVNs) based on a new manufacturing architecture model with a high development potential to satisfy an increasingly demanding and fragmented market. In short, these networks represent a compendium of the new tendencies within the production organization, such as global manufacture, strategic alliances, flexible production and mass customization. The purpose of this study is to analyze how GMVNs appear in the market and evolve in the future by considering their main characteristics that will determine their strategy positioning through a period of time. Some special tools will be proposed to study this strategic decision that will determine the starting point of the GMVN building process. Subsequently, another network features and their potential evolution will be considered to achieve a better understanding of how and why these organizations work. For achieving that purpose a case study about the engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce will be developed by analyzing already established and known facts on a new perspective that permits to have a comprehensive understanding about GMVNs. The initial descriptive approach about GMVNs, mostly developed in Section 5, based on the new perspective given by the conceptual models defined in Fig. 2 and Fig. 5 will permit to gain a broad understanding about how these organizations work. Finally sub-Section 5.3 and Section 6 give some prescriptive propositions about how GMVNs should work and evolve in the future to be efficient. The environment in which enterprises currently work with increasingly globalized markets, company consolidation and strategic alliances is forcing companies to find new forms of collaboration to improve the integration and synchronisation of the various functions and stages of their product value chain (Zhao et al., 2001). Global manufacturing virtual networks allow companies to focus on their core competences, maintaining their participation in the design and manufacture of complex integrated systems. These networks can be considered as extended manufacturing systems where various companies can co-operate on a specific project whose result is the manufacture of a product or the provision of a service and where each company is expert in one or more of the areas that give the product its value (Elmuti and Kathawala, 2001). Although there are hardly any theoretical models or studies on how these networks function, they are known to develop on a large scale and involve a complex number of participants that include enterprises, organizations and institutions covering several countries or even continents. The implications in the various manufacturing fields are manifold and knowing how they are structured, how they coordinate and plan their needs and implement their supply chain management, what their specific competences are and how the different members of the network communicate shall be some of the features this paper seeks to clarify. In addition, market demands for increasingly customized products and services lead to the implementation of new manufacturing techniques such as mass customization, where the complexity of the implementation, the information flow or the planning of resources complicate the management of this type of network even further. Fig. 1 gives a simple example of the structure of this type of network, together with the relations between the nodes.

Global manufacturing virtual networks are based on three basic vectors: the globalization of internal manufacturing processes; the supply and value chains of all the centres involved; and strategic alliances with companies outside the organization. Although this type of intercompany collaboration is becoming more and more common, especially in the aeronautical industry, the car industry and the electronics sector, there are currently no models that describe how the networks operate or how they should be managed or designed. Their future growth potential is huge, since, on the one hand, they are more efficient at meeting the requirements of a market that is becoming increasingly varied and variable in its search for customized solutions at very competitive prices and, on the other, they allow manufacturers to reduce their financial risk by disinvesting heavy internal manufacturing resources, access new markets and seamlessly incorporate technological improvements to their products. In addition, the future evolution of this type of network will be based on a greater “virtualization” of the network and a convergence with mass customization systems. The conceptual framework proposed in Fig. 2 permits a sequential analysis of all the factors that affect the design of a Global manufacturing virtual network, such as its strategy, structure, communication systems and network culture as well as to take into consideration the mutual dependence and influence of these four network features. The three-dimensional model of Fig. 5 applied to the production strategy of Rolls-Royce over time has provided a better understanding of the evolution of its strategic positioning since its beginning and has permitted to estimate its evolution for the next years. This powerful tool may permit to compare the strategic positioning of different companies and estimate the better strategy for the future. Figs. 6 and 7 have provided a good understanding about of the dynamic and fluent nature of the virtual relations in a GMVN as well as the flexibility that can be adopted depending on each engine or project. Anyhow, since this work has mostly been focused on the strategy network feature of RR, future research works could extend the analysis to other network features like its structure, its communication systems or its culture that have evidently been affected by the different strategy positions of RR over time. This approach might stress and complete the findings of this work in the future.