Managing supply chains effectively has become a criticalelement in enhancing company profitability and has beenidentified as the new frontier of competitive advantage.An important element of effective supply chainmanagement is the strategic positioning of the company.The strategic positioning process is concerned with thechoice of production-centred activities a company carriesout internally and those provided externally. Strategicpositioning within manufacturing supply chains howeveris a relatively recent research topic with apparently fewarticles currently available that explicitly addressassociated issues directly. Moreover there is no previousresearch working strategic positioning of manufacturingoperations in global context. Therefore the purpose of thispaper is to explore strategic positioning within globalsupply chains. This paper is based on three cases drawnfrom the cross industry sector manufacturing companies.It describes an exploratory analysis which is aimed atgaining insight into the success factor to form a strategicpositioning within global supply chains.