Today globalization is a common challenge companies have to cope with. Cost aspects are still playing an essential role in this context. To ensure a long-term profitability, companies also have to consider non-monetary factors like core-competences. Besides globalization the increasing rate of ramp-ups caused by decreasing product life-cycles is a big challenge for companies. This article will introduce approaches to deal with the conflict of objectives between cost-reduction, safe-guarding of core-competences and ramp-up of production systems.
