چگونه عملیات را سازماندهی کنیم؟ تمرکز و یا تقسیم؟

The concept of focus has been proposed as a method for operations to achieve superior performance by concentrating its resources on accomplishing one strategic task. Since its development by Skinner [1974. The focused factory. Harvard Business Review May–June, 113–121], it has become a key element within the operations strategy field. Despite the high level of adoption and investigation into the subject, there still seems to be little empirical support for the focus concept [Vokurka, R.J., Davis, R.A., 2000. Focused factories: empirical study of structural and performance differences. Production and Inventory Management Journal 41(1), 44–55] and a feeling that we still do not adequately understand its application in industry [Ketokivi, M., Jokinen, M., 2006. Strategy, uncertainty and the focused factory in international process manufacturing. Journal of Operations Management 24(3), 250–270]. This case-study-based research paper examines three organisations, that have organised their operations using four different approaches, to understand the advantages and disadvantages they bring. The findings show that some approaches (process and product/market) do not fully reduce the level of complexity within operations, whilst others do (market order-winner and qualifier/performance objectives). It is therefore proposed that some approaches should be re-classified as “splitting” rather than “focusing.”

Operations strategy concerns developing the necessary capabilities for the operations function to compete given its overall business and marketing strategy (Skinner, 1974; Miller and Roth, 1994) and, in doing so, determines how best to organise its resources (Hayes and Wheelwright, 1984; Wheelwright, 1984, Hayes et al., 2005; Hill, 2004). Focus is one approach to organising resources and is “based on the highly intuitive notion that a plant can achieve superior performance by concentrating its resources on accomplishing one task, rather than attempting to address an endless series of demands from internal and external sources” (Pesch, 1996, p. 32). As Hayes et al. (2005, p. 45) conclude, “Different operations structures and infrastructures are required for different missions. Therefore, a single facility, even if equipped with the most modern equipment and systems, will tend to experience both irreconcilable conflicts and low overall effectiveness if it attempts to serve multiple markets that demand different competitive strategies.”

The cross-case patterns within the research reveal advantages and disadvantages of alternative approaches to organising resources and that the order-winner approach creates the highest level of simplicity. It is therefore proposed that the order-winner approach focuses an organisation, whereas the other approaches only reduce its size. However, the process and product/market approaches to organising resources seem easier to understand than by order-winner and it was not necessary for a business to focus all products or processes to improve its performance.