اولویت های رقابت در عملیات: توسعه یک شاخص از موقعیت استراتژیک

The aim of this paper is to propose an indicator for positioning firms with regard to competitive priorities (cost, quality, delivery, flexibility, service and environment), as well as to identify any relationship with business performance that may exist. On the basis of the production competence approach, we developed an indicator of Strategic Position in Operations Priorities (SPOP). For the empirical test, we use a sample of 353 industrial firms that belong to various sectors of activity in Spain. The proposed indicator reveals the current situation of industrial firms with regard to the development of operations capabilities that allow these firms to achieve sustainable competitive advantages. The implementation of the SPOP indicator could be considered a valuable tool in performance management research.

Research in operations strategy during the past three decades has been guided by ideas developed earlier in the work of Skinner [1]. He took the first step in assigning the manufacturing function a strategic rather than a merely tactical role. His aim was to end the separation of this function from the rest of the functions as well as from a firm's competitive strategy. Other authors, such as Hayes and Schmenner [2], Buffa [3], Hayes and Wheelwright [4], Anderson et al. [5], Leong et al. [6] and Hill [7], have supported this approach and have clarified Skinner's initial contributions. All of these authors consider that the manufacturing function can contribute to a firm's success as long as it reinforces the implementation of the competitive strategy. To do this, the firm needs to formulate explicitly some operations objectives or competitive priorities and implement the policies or decisions required to accomplish these objectives [8]. Over time, different approaches have been offered to explain how firms compete taking the following priorities into account: the trade-off model, or incompatibilities between objectives [1]; the pyramid model [9]; the cumulative model [10]; and the production competence approach [11]. Many theoretical contributions have aimed to clarify these concepts. Actually the companies are faced with the need to coordinate operations capabilities with market requirements. Therefore empirical analyses need to be carried out in order to reveal the current situation of industrial firms with regard to those developments in capabilities in operations that allow these firms to achieve sustainable competitive advantages. The objective of this paper is to propose a new indicator for positioning firms with regard to competitive priorities or operations capabilities3 from the production competence model, and then to identify any correlations with business performance that may exist. Specifically, in this paper we carry out a conceptual review of the different contributions attempting to identify firms’ competitive priorities in operations. For empirical testing, we use a sample of 353 industrial firms located in Spain and that belong to various sectors of activity. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. On one hand, the authors aim to construct an indicator that measures a firm's ability to achieve a strategic position. From a conceptual perspective, this new indicator offers an improvement over indicators developed previously in the literature since it uses the entire sector's evaluation of the importance of each priority as the weighting in the indicator. In addition, from a practical perspective, the proposed indicator allows managers to determine the degree to which firms have developed capabilities in the operations competitive priorities that currently constitute the basis of competence, as well as their effect on business performance. The work is organised as follows. First, we review the literature that focuses on the theoretical determination of competitive priorities in operations and their different approaches. Second, we construct an indicator to measure a firm's strategic position with regard to these operations priorities. Third, we carry out an empirical analysis, calculating the value of the indicator for a sample of firms. Subsequently, we present the analyses carried out and the results obtained. We end this paper by summarising our main conclusions and offering suggestions for future research.

The operations management literature clearly recognises that the manufacturing unit can contribute to corporate success. For this to happen, the firm needs to formulate a number of operations competitive priorities and implement the policies or decisions necessary to accomplish them. However, we need empirical evidence on industrial firms’ current situation with regard to the development of priorities in operations that allow firms to achieve sustainable competitive advantages. Taking into account these considerations, we have aimed to determine how Spanish industrial companies are positioned in relation to the development of advantages, or capabilities, in the competitive priorities in operations. On the basis of the production competence approach, and using constructs for the priorities of cost, quality, delivery, flexibility, service, and environmental protection (under the dimensions of importance and strength), we have developed a new indicator of strategic position with regards to these priorities. Calculated in this way, the indicator measures a firm's ability to position itself in function of the advantages developed in the competitive priorities in operations, taking sector requirements into consideration. We conducted the empirical analysis using a sample of 353 Spanish industrial firms. This allowed us to draw a number of conclusions about the set of firms analysed. First, the managers’ valuations of the importance conceded to each item resulted in five factors. These represent the five priorities indicating market requirements (deliveries/flexibility in volume, service, product flexibility, environmental protection, and quality/cost, in decreasing order of importance). With this result, not only we demonstrate the validity of the items used to build the construct, but also, for the industry as a whole, we obtain the weighting that must be given to each priority (factor). This weighting is calculated as the proportion of the total variance explained by each factor. This means that for the analysed firms, the most important competitive priorities are: deliveries/flexibility in volume, service, and product flexibility. We consider that if they are important for the sector, they are also important for the market. Second, we developed the indicator (SPOP) calculating its value for each firm. Standardised between 0 and 100, values that are close to zero reflect a firm's poor advantage in the mix of priorities that the industry considers necessary to compete successfully, while values close to 100 reflect a strong advantage in these priorities. Finally, we consider that the indicator is useful if it allows us to distinguish firms according to the value the indicator takes in relation to other variables. Hence, we have obtained the explanatory capacity of the indicator with regard to productivity by means of a regression analysis. However, it did not prove possible to establish a correlation for either economic or financial profitability. The economic-financial indicators are affected by many other factors apart from those related to production capabilities. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that the higher the SPOP indicator, the higher the productivity. The indicator measures the ability to achieve a target position, so it makes sense that firms with high SPOP values will tend to be more productive. It is not surprising that financial performance does not correlate with the indicator: it is possible to imagine that a firm might set insufficient competitive priorities for itself and even though those priorities are reached, the firm is not profitable. It is conceivable that the position with regard to competitive priorities in operations will affect the productivity variable since this depends to a large extent on the manufacturing area in industrial firms, something which is not necessarily related to economic and financial profitability. Indeed, firms’ economic and financial indicators are affected by many other factors apart from their competitive priorities in operations. Furthermore, a good performance in manufacturing does not necessarily imply a good financial result, and vice versa, a good financial result does not necessarily imply good operational performance. The indicator proposed in this paper is a useful theoretical and practical contribution to Operations Management as it supposes the proposal of a new methodology to evaluate firms’ competitive priorities, introducing a novel weighting. Furthermore, the production competence model has been tested with empirical data from numerous firms, confirming that if firms develop operations capabilities based on competitive priorities, this can have positive effects on business performance. The managerial implications of the results are relevant. This study permits managers to identify the operations capabilities that form the basis of sector competition and to know the strategic positioning of the firm through the indicator's value. Nonetheless, we feel that it is possible to continue advancing in the line followed here; for example, by testing the explanatory potential of the indicator. It would be interesting to make an analysis by sectors of activity, determining whether the competitive priorities in operations are the same in different sectors. It would also be interesting to carry out longitudinal studies and integrate the indicator in a model of relationships involving competitive priorities, decisions and practices in operations management, business strategy, manufacturing unit results, and firm performance. Additionally, the companies involved in the study could be classified according to Hayes and Wheelwright's “4-stage model” [4]. It would be interesting to know the stages the companies surveyed have reached and then explain the reason why there is no correlation with corporate results.