Strategic supply chain management in process industries. An application to specialty chemicals production network design. (Q885896)

The thesis consists of 6 chapters. Chapter 1 gives a motivation from the chemical industry and an outline of the book. Chapter 2, ``Production network design and specialty chemicals'', starts with a definition of supply chains and production networks and continues the integration into advanced planning systems. The next sections illustrate why network design is a central part in the manufacturing strategy. The author discusses issues of flexibility and moves on to the importance of locational analysis. The last sections of this chapter concentrate on the specific situation in the chemical industry. Chapter 3, titled ``Global production network optimization'', provides a mathematical model to support the global network optimization and a very brief review on location theory references. At the end of this chapter the author claimed that his model is applicable using as a solution tool ILOG or CPLEX. Chapter 4, ``Evaluation of individual production sites'', starts with brief comments on multicriteria decision analysis, data envelopment analysis and the special situation in the chemical industry. Chapter 5, ``Case study production network optimization'', concentrates on the value chain and a decision support in practice. The book finishes with a conclusion, an appendix and finally a long list of references. This dissertation is a collection of many topics closely related to supply chain networks. It contains a couple of mistakes.