یک دیدگاه درباره استراتژی تولید: تولید بیشتر با کمتر

Over the last decade, the manufacturing landscape has changed worldwide. Parts of the traditional manufacturing activities have moved to world regions, away from the long-established industrial centres in Western Europe, North America and Japan. The demand for goods has been increased and so has the demand for natural resources and energy. However, since resources and energy are finite, new ways of producing more with less ought to be found. In this context, this work discusses the challenges to be addressed and focuses on the technologies, related to novel processes, materials and information/communication, which could deal with the issues pertaining to increased demand on manufacturing goods, the finite resources, and environment-conscious production.

Manufacturing is global. In fact, international business activity is not a recent phenomenon. It can be traced as far back as the late 19th century when the onset of the industrial revolution resulted in the need for large-scale operations. Over the years, the nature of these operations has changed significantly [1]. The changes can be attributed mainly to the variations at the level of trade barriers and the development of more efficient modes of transportation and communication that have made possible a higher level of coordination. Moreover, during the last few decades the level of innovation has dramatically grown to such an extent that, in order for firms to be familiar with the best products, processes, materials and technologies, they must have access to international operations in all three major industrial centres of the Triad: Western Europe, North America, and Japan as well as the Far East countries. In 2002, the share of total global manufacturing trade was 18% for the European Union, while the US had 12% and Japan 8%. However, besides the main regions, which have been traditionally active in the manufacturing world, today, there are a lot of other spots all over the globe that significant manufacturing activities take place. Global manufacturing addresses today a constantly increasing demand for consumer goods. Although consumption patterns may slightly vary from one world region to another, driven by local cultural, societal and economic factors, the average global consumption expenditure keeps increasing as living standards grow. In order for this trend to be addressed, production of goods is on the increase worldwide. Statistics show that this applies not only to high-tech goods, e.g. computers, but also to goods with long tradition in everyday life use, e.g. bicycles (Fig. 1) [32].