مطالعه اکتشافی از شیوه های استراتژی تولید در شرکت های تولیدی ماشین آلات در هند

This paper presents findings of a survey on manufacturing strategy practices adopted by the Indian machinery manufacturing companies (IMMC). Based on the survey, three companies have been selected for detailed case studies. Their experiences in the manufacturing strategy process are analyzed. Although the companies represented diversity in terms of product type, sales volume, and geographic location, they share several commonalties including use of advanced manufacturing technologies and use of several improvement techniques. The process of strategy formulation varied among the companies in terms of participants, complexity and degree of formalization. Competitive priorities, order winners and critical success factors are also identified for these companies. Based on strategic manufacturing issues, manufacturing competence index and business performance index for the companies has been worked out.

Manufacturing companies are under increasingly diverse and mounting pressures due to more sophisticated markets, changing customer choice and global competition. The market for products is becoming increasingly international. In such a competitive scenario companies have to search for new processes, new materials, new vendors, new shop floor design, and new channels to deliver their products and services at competitive price. Indian companies are no exception to this. Indian companies have quite often followed an opportunistic approach to growth as opposed to a capability driven approach that seeks to strengthen key aspects of manufacturing and paid very little strategic attention to their shop floors in the last few decades [1]. This was reflected in poor quality of products, lack of awareness about competitiveness, and most importantly no integration of various business functions such as marketing/sales and production. The industrial environment in India was traditionally identified by its regulative and protective characteristics. Till 1990, the Indian economy was inward-looking and protected from internal and external competition. In the absence of competition, firms did not develop the technological capability needed for penetrating the global market [2]. The short-term orientation was due to high cost of capital, frequent government policy changes, and highly protective environment [3]. The abolition of license system in 1991 meant the end of old regime of protection and control. Today Indian industry is facing competition from imports and from multinational companies in the domestic markets. The new competition is in terms of reduced cost, improved quality, products with higher performance, a wider range of products and better service, all delivered simultaneously to enhance value to customers. Indian machinery manufacturing companies (IMMC) meets the manufacturing requirements of a variety of sectors of the manufacturing industry. Indian machinery are a major source of inputs for the country's defense, railways and other infrastructural requirements. It is the basic industry providing “mother machines” (as the Chinese call it) to all sectors of the economy. It has performed its role of providing the latest, sophisticated in many cases, machining solutions, that make manufacturing more cost competitive. Table 1 shows an overview (output, exports, and employment) of IMMC. About 4373 billion US $ worth of machinery industry, contributes to about 1% to the gross domestic product (GDP) of India [4]. This formed motivation for the study. In this light, manufacturing strategy is urgently needed for Indian firms to: • respond to business strategy and corporate objectives, • correct present weaknesses or to exploit strengths, • cope with anticipated environmental changes, • get distinctive competence which is currently not available, • make manufacturing function strong, • achieve internationally competitive performance objectives. The specific objectives of this study are to: • find practices followed by IMMC in relation to manufacturing strategy, • assess competitive priorities of an organization, • identify order winners for IMMC, • explore activities of improvements, • to establish relation between manufacturing competence index (MCI) and business performance index (BPI).In this research, we conducted a survey of IMMC to get familiar with the practices adopted on manufacturing strategy. Companies are mapped for competitive priorities, order winners, position as per Hayes and Wheelwright's [5] model, and investment in improvement activities. Competitive priorities are major manufacturing objectives of a company, which includes quality, delivery, flexibility, cost and innovation. However order winners are the key criteria due to which customer buy the product. Order winners are such manufacturing related and non-manufacturing related criteria, which are provided by the competitors. Based on the survey, detailed case study of three companies has been conducted. We have also calculated manufacturing competence index (MCI) and business performance index (BPI) for the entire industry and case companies. The organization of the paper is as follows: Section 2 presents the literature review on manufacturing strategy. Section 3 describes the research methodology used. Survey findings are presented in Section 4. Case study of the three companies is given in Section 5. Section 6 deals with MCI calculations and Section 7 describes BPI. Section 8 proposes a linkage model. Conclusions and limitations of the study are given in Section 9.

Based on our study the concluding remarks are grouped under two categories (general remarks and case specific remarks). General remarks 1. In machinery manufacturing industry lead-time plays an important role. Now due to easy import policy of government of India, better quality machine tools are available at competitive prices in a shorter time from the foreign competitors. Therefore IMMC forced to reformulate their competitive strategy. 2. The study depicts that manufacturing strategy of most companies participated in the survey are focused on improving product and process quality and delivering products on time. However competitive advantage can be obtained through fundamental changes in the way manufacturing is organized. Indian companies are giving less importance to flexibility (Table 3), whereas companies from other countries (USA, Japan Korea, Singapore, etc.) are giving priority to flexibility [13] and [25]. It seems that IMMC are still at the bottom of the sand cone model [68]. According to Noble [66] quality forms the solid foundation at the bottom of cumulative model, followed by layers of delivery, cost, flexibility and innovation. 3. Most of the machinery manufacturing companies seems to be in stage II or in transition from stage II to stage III of Hayes and Wheelwright's model as depicted by Table 5. This is due to increased competition from multinationals; Indian companies have started improving upon performance measures. 4. Our study highlights that in general IMMC are investing highly in advance management systems (such as management training, benchmarking and TQM) as an improvement activity for gaining competitive advantage over competitors (Table 6). 5. The MCI is the reflection of the relative assessment of strengths and weaknesses within the company [67]. Manufacturing competence is a cumulative process of influencing organizations and the associated environments through management interventions so that a company can towards an active manufacturing function. IMMC need to consistently analyze the strategic manufacturing issues, they are facing to identify the critical success factors and to take the appropriate actions in order to gain strategic advantages. Manufacturing competence index is the right diagnostic tool to assess relative competitive position of a company, which indicate the strengths and weaknesses in strategic manufacturing issues. Manufacturing competence index gives a measure of manufacturing's performance, which is expected to affect the performance of a company. Table 8 shows the MCI value for IMMC industry i.e. 2.02. 6. The company's performance is reflected through BPI. Business performance reflects the position of a company in the market, which is ultimately derived from manufacturing competence. Table 9 shows the BPI value for IMMC (3.01) and case companies. We have presented a model, which links these two performance measures. Fig. 6 shows the relative position of the companies on BPI and MCI. It seems that our proposition has not hold true for IMMC, since few companies are still in stage II of Hayes and Wheelwright's model. 7. The correlation coefficient between BPI and MCI appears to be, View the MathML source. The relationship between MCI and BPI is not so clear as was assumed. One possible answer could be that the companies classified as machinery industry are so diverse that comparison between them is very difficult. In machinery sector each company could be different not only in its product standard, but also in delivery and pricing convention. Therefore developing a business strategy is a very difficult process in machinery industry, while it could be less problematic in other sectors (electronics, automotive, etc.) [25]. Vickery [65] suggested that business performance might be affected by many other factors beyond the manufacturing competence. Vickery et al. [68] found that production competence may have more of an effect on business performance for the pure strategy of differentiation, compared with strategy of differentiation/cost. Case specific remarksTable 10 1. Table 10 gives the comparison of the companies under case study on important issues such as focus of MS, formulation of MS, objectives of MS, competitive priorities, order winners, improvement activities and stage as per Hayes and Wheelwright's model. 2. Top most competitive priority for companies Alpha, Beta and Gamma is delivery. This is obvious for machinery industry, since throughput time and on time delivery is very important in this sector. Quality, innovation, flexibility and cost are accorded the next priority for the companies. 3. Company Beta is operating in stage III of Hayes and Wheelwright's model i.e. in internally supportive stage, whereas company Alpha and Gamma are in stage II i.e. externally neutral stage, similar to general IMMC. This is also reflected by their MCI values. Being in stage III of Hayes and Wheelwright's model, company Beta has higher MCI (1.54) as compared to that of company Alpha (0.94) and Gamma (-0.46). It seems that MCI and Hayes and Wheelwright's stages are related with each other. 4. Similar to general IMMC studied in survey, the companies Alpha, Beta and Gamma are investing more in advanced management systems such as management training, customer relations, TQM, etc. as evidenced from Table 6. 5. Table 8 shows the manufacturing competence index (MCI) values for the companies studied under case. The highest MCI (1.54) is for company Beta, whereas it is 0.94 for company Alpha and -0.46 for company Gamma. The MCI value is negative for company Gamma, as functions of the company are not aligned. It seems that production and marketing functions are not properly coordinated, although the company has started re-formulation of its marketing and manufacturing strategies. The weak areas for company Alpha are innovation, flexibility, use of AMT, and cost, whereas that of company Beta is flexibility, cost, use of AMT, and exports. The company Gamma is weak in use of AMT, innovation, flexibility, cost, and alignment of manufacturing strategy and corporate strategy. 8. We have tried to map these companies in various manufacturing strategy-related issues based on the following frameworks: • mission/vision statements, • organization structure, • manufacturing strategy formulation, • relative position of the firms in Hayes and Wheelwright's framework, • improvement activities, • competitive priorities, • order winners, • manufacturing competence index. 9. It seems that company Alpha has more formal method of manufacturing strategy formulation as compared to company Beta and Gamma. General Managers (production and engineering) and Deputy General Managers (quality assurance and finance) are involved in strategy formulation in company Alpha, whereas company Beta and Gamma observes less involvement of manufacturing function. 10. Conformance quality is the top preferred order winner for companies Alpha and Gamma, however that of for company Beta is product range. This observation is supported by their export figures. Since company Alpha (60% exports) and Gamma (3% exports) are exporting their product, therefore they are emphasizing more on quality.In our study we tried to assess the manufacturing strategy issues in IMMC. This study has several limitations, which future researchers could consider. We adopted mono-respondent approach in administration of questionnaire, due to high cost associated with multi-respondent approach. We could study only three case companies in detail due to following limitations: • Hesitation of Indian companies to take part in such studies. • Few IMMC are still adopting opportunistic approach. More research with larger sample is required to generalize the findings. It may be noted that the present study is based on a survey of machine manufacturers in India. The following limitations of the survey may be kept in mind: (a) sample size of 22, which may be considered as small, (b) the respondents of the survey are at different levels in their respective organizational hierarchy. It is likely that managers at different levels in the same organization may perceive the competitive priorities differently.