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Manufacturing companies develop multiple production sites for various reasons from cheaper labour to access to local markets. Expansion of capacity in such a manufacturing network is a complex decision and requires consideration of multiple factors. Traditionally, industrial decision makers attempt to minimise the cost of expansion and, usually as an afterthought, consider soft factors like manpower availability and logistics connectivity. This approach has gained acceptance as the research community has focused on developing better mathematical representations of the problem rather than investigate the larger decision process. A review of the literature revealed that all existing processes for multi-site capacity expansion decision fail in this way. Therefore, this research sets out to fulfil the needs of practitioners by developing a...

Investment in capacity expansion remains one of the most critical decisions for a manufacturing organisation with global production facilities. Multiple factors need to be considered making the decision process very complex. The purpose of this paper is to establish the state-of-the-art in multi-factor models for capacity expansion of manufacturing plants within a corporation. The research programme consisting of an extensive literature review and a structured assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the current research is presented. The study found that there is a wealth of mathematical multi-factor models for evaluating capacity expansion decisions however no single contribution captures all the different facets of the problem.