AMERICAN (USA) TELECOMMUNICATION COMPANY

American (USA) telecommunication company

American (USA) telecommunication company

Introduction

Facility location decision involves organizations seeking to locate, relocate or expand their operations. The facility location decision process encompasses the identification, analysis, evaluation and selection among alternatives. Plants, warehouses, retail outlets, terminals, and storage yards are typical facilities to be located. Site selection starts normally with the recognition of a need for additional capacity. A decision is then made to start the search for the “best” location.

Advicing as a Consultant to the Management of American (USA) Telecommunication Company

Facility location decision has drawn increased attention from both academic and business communities in the past two decades. Many large corporations even do sufficient site selections to warrant a full-time executive for these functions. Facility location problems have attracted researchers with diverse backgrounds such as economics, industrial engineering, and geography (Ghosh and Harche, 1993).

It has been well recognized that facility location selection has important strategic implications for the operations to be located, because a location decision normally will involve long-term commitment of resources and be irreversible in nature. Specifically, the location choice for a manufacturing facility may have a significant impact on the American (USA) telecommunication American (USA) telecommunication company's strategic competitive position in terms of operating cost, delivery speed performance, and American (USA) telecommunication American (USA) telecommunication company's flexibility to compete in the marketplace. For example, selecting a production facility location that will allow the American (USA) telecommunication company to achieve proximity to suppliers has become a critical strategic advantage in the recent marketplace, since proximity to suppliers is important to JIT (Just-In-Time) production systems and flexible distribution systems for reduced inventories and improved delivery performance. Therefore, the final selection of a facility location must contribute to the success of corporate strategic plans for financing, marketing, human resource, and production objectives (Mount, 1990).

The increased attention to business logistics has also contributed to the interest in location decision (Ballou and Masters, 1993). Location decision, inventory management, transportation system design, and customer service level requirement are four major components of logistic planning. These components should be planned collectively due to their close interrelations. Location decision research is also promoted by various public and private interest groups which have a high stake behind location selection decisions (Galbraith, DeNoble and Estavillo, 1990). In the private sector, for instance, location decisions concern many stakeholders including venture capitalists, financial investors, industrial site developers, as well as hotel and convention centre managers. In contrast, the primary public interest about location decisions is from local governments or their economic development agencies, who view attracting new business as a key to the economic wellbeing of their region and communities.

Facility location selection is a typical multi-criteria decision-making (MDM) problem in which managerial preference among performance criteria plays a key role in the final decision. To assess the decision-maker's preference explicitly with a preference model, many efforts have been made to develop the theory and methodology for preference assessment. In the current literature, the most preferred approaches are multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) and analytic hierarchy ...