Location strategy and Location & site selection
One of your key strategic decisions is selecting the right location for your operations. You are making new investments in land, buildings, equipment and talent for the long term. As the global business environment in which you need to make a location decision is becoming more uncertain every day, it is crucial to make a robust and future proof selection of a location.
After a sharp decrease in 2023 with 26% of the take up of logistics real estate in 11 European markets, the take up in 2024 will stabilize. This is one of the conclusions of two studies Buck Consultants International / BCI Global published this morning.
In an exclusive report, the expert team at Netherlands-based BCI Global takes a close look at two dozen ‘out-of-the-box’ cities for future software development and support centers.
In the current global environment, uncertainty is a given. Geopolitical turmoil, technological developments, labor market challenges, tax climate changes to name a few, are having a huge impact on cost effectiveness, quality of the business environment and the risk profile of your current locations. We support you with a thorough fact-based location strategy and site selection analytics, no matter whether your project has a global scope or is focused on EMEA, North America, LATAM, China or Asia-Pacific.
We can support in two phases of your location selection process:
Scenario analysis
In this strategic phase we support you with defining and analyzing meaningful location scenarios in order to answer questions such as: can we expand at our current locations or should be set up a new location? How many new locations do we need? In what geographical area should we start selecting a new location and site? In the scenario definition and analyses we take amongst others the following factors into account:
- Your company’s overall business strategy
- Future business projections
- External factors (e.g. economy, geopolitical, legal and regulatory, climate, technology)
Based on a well-based quantitative and qualitative comparison of the different location scenarios the preferred scenario is selected and the next steps for your company are defined. These next steps may include a detailed location & site selection process.
Location & Site Selection
In order to select the optimal location for your company’s new manufacturing site, distribution center, headquarters or support office, we execute a step-wise filtering process. The filtering from longlist to shortlist and final optimal location is very much fact-based and focuses on comparing locations from a Cost, Quality of the Business Environment and Risk perspective.
Once the shortlist of candidate locations is defined we start the fieldwork activities: conducting fieldwork visits to the top locations in order to validate and enrich all desk research findings with actual insights from the field. In addition to our location strategy and site selection projects we also help companies in:
- detailed labor market analyses, applying our proven IDEAL methodology (In-Depth Assessment of Labor Markets) to answer your questions regarding the feasibility of recruiting and retaining your staff in current and / or new locations.
- detailed location risk assessments, using our in-house developed IRAM risk framework (Integral Risk Assessment Method), to assess the risk level of your company’s current (and potential future) locations on 46 different location risk elements.
If you want to know more about the specifics of our location selection approach and experience for manufacturing plants, distribution centers and / or headquarters and support centers, click below for more options.