Towards Factory location planning using GIS

Abstract

Today, companies face continuously increasing competitive pressure resulting from highly volatile markets, globalisation and constantly growing customer requirements. Against this background, the location of a factory has a significant influence on competitiveness. The process of location planning is crucial for future success, as the choice of location can determine competitive aspects such as the distance to customers and suppliers or the attractiveness for employees for decades. At present, location decisions are often derived heuristically by gradually narrowing down the object of consideration starting from the global level. In the future, geo-information systems (GIS) shall help to make a more holistic and future-proof factory location decision, which is less dependent on subjective feelings and takes less time and costs. In this paper, the necessary fundamentals for factory location planning with GIS are presented, and it is explained which factory planning information can support location planning using GIS.