Investigating Causal Relationships between Disruptions, Product Quality and Network Configurations in Global Production Networks

Companies nowadays act in global production networks. These networks offer advantages such as production close to market as well as the exploitation of low factor costs. However, due to their interlinkage and complex structure, the resulting networks are characterized by a high susceptibility to disruptions. This paper presents an approach, which quantitatively examines the effects of disrupting events in production networks. The main focus of the study is on the question of how product quality is influenced by quality-related disruptions. To describe the analyzed relationships best, a Kriging based metamodel is adapted to the behavior of the developed multimethod simulation model. The results of the investigation are formalized causal relationships between the error probabilities in production networks, the inspection frequencies of the production systems involved, the respective generic network configurations and the observed PPM quality score.