Abstract
Franchising as an organizational form gains in recent years, more and more importance and grows even faster than the overall economy. While we can find many business and juridical approaches and research about franchising, there is a lack of guidelines for planning, design and implementation of distributed manufacturing units within franchise networks. This paper presents an Axiomatic Design based concept for the design of a franchise production system with geographically distributed, changeable, scalable as well as replicable manufacturing units. The aim of this research is to derive a complete set of design parameters for the production system as well as a systematic approach for its implementation. To validate and prove the developed concept it has been applied and illustrated in a real case study with an Italian Franchise company.