The internationalization of operations has been quite a common trend for Western companies over the last 20 years. The development of manufacturing networks is a more and more common solution also for SMEs. In order to make sure that the whole network evolves according to the business requirements, each single plant needs to be assigned a precise role. Starting from the well-known framework proposed by Ferdows ([5]; [6]) on the strategic role of plants, a tool is developed to monitor the role of production plants by aligning the vision of the headquarters and the one of the plant itself. Four case studies are carried out to validate the model and some guidelines are then derived to interpret the output. This paper contributes to the field dealing with the strategic role of plants with a proposal that can be easily applied by practitioners.