Which factories should produce which products?
The questions behind the question:
- Should we move this production line back from country A to country B, and how long until it pays for itself?
- If this tariff holds, which of our eleven plants becomes uncompetitive?
- We are opening a site. Which products should move to it, and what does that do to the ones that stay?
- Our second-source supplier is in a country we can no longer rely on. What is the real cost of dual sourcing?
- Moving this volume means investing in the receiving site. Is it worth it, and what would the same money buy us elsewhere?
Why it is hard today
Usual approach builds an Excel from scratch, used once
Each question triggers a new spreadsheet. Three to six weeks to build, a handful of scenarios to run, and no reuse when the next question comes.
Often, the constraints that matter are the implicit ones nobody wrote down
Qualification lead times. Which lines can physically take which references. The customer contract that forbids the transfer. These live in people's heads, and a generic model silently ignores them.
The trade-off curves are invisible
You see three options. You do not see that a fourth was twelve percent better, or that one constraint you accepted without discussion was costing eight million a year.
By the time it lands, the inputs have moved
Tariffs change in six weeks. Footprint studies take four months.
What Paradygma changes
You see the frontier, not a point
Not “here is the optimum”, but the full trade-off between cost, carbon, lead time, capex and resilience — so the arbitration happens in the room, with the options visible, instead of being buried in the modelling.
You can price your constraints
“What is this social commitment costing us?” stops being an uncomfortable question and becomes a number. Which is precisely what makes it possible to keep the commitment, deliberately.
The investment is part of the answer, not an afterthought
Each configuration carries what it requires: the line, the tooling, the qualification, the capacity to be built and when it has to be funded. So you compare configurations on the capital they consume as well as the cost they save — and you can see which ones your budget envelope puts out of reach.
The answer survives a new hypothesis
Tariff changes on Monday. Variants are identified in minutes.
The model stays
Next year's footprint question starts from a model that already exists, and your team runs it.