مقایسه بین المللی اثر شکاف اجرای استراتژی تولید بر عملکرد کسب و کار

This study has the purpose of empirically testing the importance of consistency between manufacturing strategies and practices in achieving better business performances. An empirical test has been conducted and compared on the data sets from three different nations, each of which seems to have quite different manufacturing capabilities and competitive environments. The empirical test result implies that the gap variable indicating inconsistency between manufacturing strategy and implementation practices plays a more important role than the strategy or implementation variable in discriminating the superior from the inferior performance groups. For those data sets from the US and Korea, the gap variables of flexibility, quality and/or cost show more significant contribution in discriminating business performance groups. But none of the gap variables outperform other strategy or implementation variables in discriminating performance groups in Japan.

What will be the ultimate goal of manufacturing strategies or practices? Why are we compelled to adopt so many up-to-date three-letter manufacturing innovation approaches such as BPR (Business Process Reengineering), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), TQM (Total Quality Management), JIT (Just-In-Time), TPM (Total Productive Maintenance), CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing), QFD (Quality Function Deployment), DFM (Design For Manufacturer), FMS (Flexible Manufacturing System), CAD (Computer-Aided Manufacturing) and CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering)? The answer is simply: in order to be more competitive and profitable. But how we can be so is not that simply answered. A firm usually can use only limited resources for implementing its strategies and/or practices. Because of this limitation, it has to seek more cost-effective as well as goal-achievable ways of allocating its resources. A commonly suggested approach to prioritize resource allocations among manufacturing activities is to take into account their relative contributions toward achieving the firm's strategic goals pursued in its manufacturing strategy. In this context, manufacturing strategy consists of two core elements, as Miller and Roth [1] pointed out: the manufacturing task and the pattern of manufacturing choices. The first states what the manufacturing function must accomplish [2], the so-called competitive priorities such as quality, cost, delivery or flexibility, while the second is concerned with the major decisions on manufacturing structure and infrastructure that a company makes to achieve its addressed manufacturing tasks [3]. There have been a large number of theoretical and empirical research studies designed to investigate the relationship between manufacturing strategies, practices and performances. Even though some of the most recent will be briefly discussed later, most of these research studies are focused on a one-to-one relationship between strategic orientation and performance or between manufacturing practices and performances. Very few empirical studies directly address the appropriateness of manufacturing practices for a certain strategic orientation. And most of them also fail to extend their findings to show how this appropriateness can affect business performance. As Dixon et al. [4] point out, however, strategically important manufacturing activities should be given more attention and resources than those that are not important. Over- or under-allocation of manufacturing resources should be avoided to achieve a more balanced and cost-effective use of them. This study aims to empirically test the importance of consistency between manufacturing strategies and practices in achieving better business performances. An empirical test has been conducted on the data sets from three different nations, each of which seems to have quite different manufacturing capabilities and competitive environments. This international comparison is to see whether a consistency–performance relationship can be generalized regardless of the nation's specific characteristics of manufacturing systems. A consistency measure is defined in terms of the gap between the perceived importance of a competitive priority and thought-to-be-important manufacturing practices to achieve this priority. Consistency measures along with other strategy and implementation measures are then compared to investigate which measures are more effective to differentiate high performance business units from low performance ones.

This study has the purpose of empirically testing the importance of consistency between manufacturing strategies and practices in achieving better business performances. An empirical test has been conducted on the data sets from three different nations, each of which seems to have quite different manufacturing capabilities and competitive environments. This international comparison is to see whether this consistency-performance relationship can be generalized regardless of the nation specific characteristics of manufacturing systems. What we have learned from the empirical study is that the gap variable indicating inconsistency between manufacturing strategy and implementation practices plays a more important role than the strategy or implementation variable in discriminating the superior from the inferior performance groups. For those data sets from the US and Korea, the gap variables of flexibility, quality and/or cost show more significant contribution for discriminating between business performance groups. Even though this gap variable fails to outperform other strategy or implementation variables in discriminating between performance groups in Japan, the overall discriminating power of the proposed gap variables can be considered to be significant based on this finding.