Designing and Managing Global Supply Networks

Benetton Group is currently one of the world largest garment producer – with manufacturing facilities and stores located all over the world - a global enterprise with turnover around US$2 billions, and 7,000 employees. Since the 1980s, Benetton's tremendous growth, outstanding financial performance and innovative strategies have been widely celebrated by the press, researched by scholars, admired by practitioners, and studied in business schools almost everywhere in the world. Thanks to this success, Benetton became a world famous company, and, for many years, represented, worldwide, the archetypal example of the "network organization", "hollow" enterprise. However, globalization and new information and communication technologies have accelerated the "clockspeed" even in such a labor intensive, mature industry as textile-apparel, sharpening competition and changing the power structure across the supply chain, where, at the moment, large, pure international retailers hold a dominant position, shape global production networks and are capable of operating on the world market offering high-quality products to sophisticated, multi-ethnic customers.