For nearly 50 years, Plant Location International (PLI) - a specialized service within IBM Global Business Services for Global Location Strategies - has established itself as a market leader in providing advice to companies on their location decisions, covering all sectors and types of business functions. Moreover, drawing on extensive expertise and knowledge of what shapes corporate investment decisions, PLI works with government agencies worldwide for economic development and investment promotion in their efforts to improve and market their locations to investors.

Corporate location consulting

To corporate executives facing the need to make complex decisions where to establish, expand or consolidate operations around the world, we offer the following services:

• Strategic location planning and selection
• Definition of key location criteria for specific operations
• Screening of multiple locations to quickly identify best options
• Global resourcing and labor market evaluation
• Review and validation of preferred location options (second opinion)
• Site and facility search, once a preferred country/region is selected
• Consolidation and/or disposal of existing sites and facilities
• Advice and negotiation assistance on incentives and other financial support
• Ongoing monitoring of business environments and industry strategy
• Workshops to optimize client's internal location selection efforts

 

Specialized economic development and investment promotion consulting

Based on our extensive experience working directly with investors we offer unique expertise to economic development organizations (EDO) and investment promotion agencies (IPA).Taking an investor’s perspective as our point of departure, we offer the following services on:

• Location benchmarking and competitive positioning analysis
• Investment trend analysis using our Global Investment Locati ons Database
• Develop effective investment promotion strategies
• Economic impact analysis
• Marketing strategies and tools
• Analysis and advice on EDO/IPA organization effectiveness
• Training EDO/IPA staff on investors decision making
• Workshops to improve marketing strategies and efforts
• Location Intelligence On Demand

Our globally integrated consulting practice is supported by a large variety of databases and techniques, many developed in-house on the basis of our many years working with companies making decisions where to locate their operations. Tools that have become industry standards are for example:

IBM-PLI's Location Benchmarking Tool
This tool helps corporate clients quickly identify the best locations for their operations based on project specific location requirements. The tool helps analyze the cost and quality trade-off of locations, relative strengths and weaknesses of various locations, as well evaluating the impact of possible changes in business environments over time. EDOs/IPAs also use IBM-PLI'S Location Benchmarking Tool to assess their location's competitiveness for selected target sectors and functions.

GILD - Global Investment Locations Database
GILD is the leading corporate investment tracking database, registering 'mobile' investment projects around the world, allowing representative and up-to-date location trend analysis on a global scale. GILD records announcements of new (greenfield) and expansion projects by companies. For each project announcement, details are registered on the investor, origin, location of investment, sector and cluster, activity and type of investment, as well as estimated jobs, capital invested, locations considered, etc. as available. Investments through business mergers and acquisitions are not included in GILD, since these investments are not driven by attractiveness of individual locations. Being the most comprehensive and accurate global investment database in the market, GILD provides unrivalled insight into global trends in corporate location decision making.

Global Location Trends reports
Based on analysis of data from IBM’s proprietary Global Investment Locations Database, we prepare annual Global Location Trends reports as well as tailored country reports for selected countries. These reports present and analyze the latest trends in corporate location selection around the world and are the most realistic and up to date reflection of expansion and relocation behavior of companies, as well as of the degree in which countries and regions around the world are successful in attracting new business.

Should you wish to connect directly with PLI's leadership, please contact:

Roel Spee
Global Leader
office +32 2 416 59 28
mobile +32 475 915 832
Roel.Spee@be.ibm.com