Industrialized production most often takes place in large-scale systems consisting of multisite units, which are managed with central strategic planning, and decision units and local management teams in order to exploit capacity and scale benefits. Manufacturers are searching for new strategies that will increase their capability to be responsive to market needs while remaining competitive according to cost, time and service level criteria. Responsiveness has mainly been studied in one-dimensional production and supply chain environments, single production sites or the supply chain of a single production site. We argue in this paper that in the fast-moving consumer sector (FMCS) within a multisite production environment, where there is a need for coordination, responsiveness has to be further analyzed. We have explored responsiveness and flexibility in such an environment in order to identify the factors that require and enable responsiveness in a production networks system, and identified a number of factors, which are analyzed in the form of a case study.

By increasing advances in the production networks planning, understanding of relations and dynamics of production networks is gaining more attention in order to use all network capabilities. To achieve this understanding, it is not only important to have a good understanding of individual firm's manufacturing flexibility next to supply chain flexibility, but also to consider the internal (among production network's facilities) and external (other tiers of supply chain) relationships in a production network. Studying the production network's flexibility dimensions facilitates the effective use of the synergy of cooperation in the network. On other words, the potential in the network structure cannot be exploited unless the planning and control of network consider the available flexibility of network and operationalize the opportunities which arise. This paper identifies different dimensions of flexibility in a production network and describes how they can support firms in responding to customers' needs. This research employs exploratory and descriptive approaches and uses a single case study of Norwegian diary to capture the dynamics of production networks. Three product categories with different network characteristics are selected, and the identified network flexibility dimensions are investigated for these products. The status of case company under each flexibility dimension is presented and discussed.

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Abstract.A production network enables a company to develop capabilities to respond to diversity in national or regional demand, while at the same time integrate and coordinate their activities. Many companies have implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to overcome problems associated with coordination and planning in an organization, in recent years. In addition, advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems have emerged to address the planning insufficiencies of ERP systems. However, due to complexity and competence dependency of these systems, advantages of them are overlooked by large organizations, and therefore ERP systems are still in use for planning. ERP systems are used in production networks for coordination of various plans and decisions across network partners. This paper aims to assess the fit and alignment between ERP functions and production network requirement for supporting production planning processes. Using a case study approach, the paper illustrates and discusses the applicability of ERP systems for planning in production networks. The case study showed that ERP systems have limited ability in coordinating order allocation in the network, detailed short term production planning and inter network distributions. It is concluded that use of ERP systems for network planning may in fact limit the network's ability to reap the full benefits associated with planning across several facilities in a network.