نظریه پردازی در راستای استراتژی تولید چابک ؛ مطالعات موردی از طبقه بندی چابکی

Agility is widely accepted in the manufacturing industry as a new competitive concept. However, how to develop a manufacturing strategy based around agility is not fully understood. A numerical taxonomy of agile manufacturing strategies was developed recently by the author, based on a large scale questionnaire study of UK industry. The taxonomy suggested the existence of three basic types of agility strategies: quick, responsive, and proactive. This paper presents a case-based investigation of the practical details of the three basic types of agility strategies. Typical cases from the basic strategy types were chosen and studied to establish why companies choose each type of the strategies, what distinctive agility drivers they are faced with and why, and whether and what typical action programs are used to implement the strategies. A cross-case analysis found that the choice of agility strategies is related to the nature of markets and competition, the characteristics of products (life cycles and degrees of maturity), and market positions of individual companies.

Two elements are central to the definition of a manufacturing strategy. “Manufacturing task” (Miller and Roth, 1994), concerned with capabilities a manufacturing unit must have in order to compete given the overall business strategy, is represented by a list of competitive capabilities, ranked according to importance. “Manufacturing choices” (Flynn et al., 1999), on the other hand, are concerned with decisions made by a manufacturing unit with regard to its facilities, technology, ways of integration, capacity, organisation, workforce policies, and information systems. The theory is that good fitness between “task” and “choice” will lead to superior performance. The work of Miller and Roth (1994) is widely cited in the literature (Frohlich and Dixon, 2001). Based on 11 competitive capabilities and a taxonomical approach, it identified three types of strategies: marketeers, caretakers, and innovators, commonly used by North America manufacturers at the time. Significant changes have since taken place in the manufacturing industry. A follow-up study using the same set of capabilities (Frohlich and Dixon, 2001) found that while strategies for caretakers and innovators remained in existence the strategy for marketeers had been replaced by new forms of strategies. An important aspect that has not been considered is the emergence of agility as a new competitive concept in the 1990s. Agility recognises the significant impact of increasingly rapid changes from a dynamic business environment on manufacturing (Iacocca Institute, 1991) and argues for the emphasis of capabilities for dealing with rapid changes in a manufacturing strategy (Zhang and Sharifi, 2000 and Sharifi and Zhang, 1999). Following the argument, manufacturing task and choices need to be aligned to provide companies with the capabilities of coping with and exploiting changes as opportunities, and good fitness between a manufacturing strategy and changes in the business environment is expected to lead to good performance (Sharifi and Zhang, 2001). The last 15 years have witnessed the wide spread acceptance of agility as a new competitive concept. Despite this, the question of how to build agility in an organisation remains to be answered satisfactorily. Specifically, what are the capabilities to be developed given different sets of changes in the business environment? Are there different types of strategies that can be adopted? How are they to be chosen? What are the practices/techniques to be implemented for a chosen strategy? This paper presents a case-based investigation of three basic agility strategies, identified from a taxonomical study of UK industry (Zhang and Sharifi, 2007). Typical cases from the strategy types were studied to establish why companies choose each type of strategies, what distinctive agility drivers they are faced with and why, and whether and what typical action programs are used to implement the strategies.

The study of the three typical cases from the taxonomy suggests that top concerns for a company in terms of agility drivers do vary with business characteristics, specifically, the nature of market and competition, the characteristics of products (life cycles, maturity stages), and market positions. The choice of agility strategy seems to relate to the characteristics and drivers. The “quick” case, for instance, presented a company with short product life cycles, deriving revenues from early product lives, and focusing on niche markets. Main top concerns are “growth of niche market”, “increasing changes in product models”, “rapidly changing market”, “innovation rate increasing”, and “decreasing new product time to market”. Its strategy emphasises “focus on customers” and “quick new product development”. The “responsive” case, on the other hand, involves a company with relatively long product life cycles, operating at the mature stages of products (with frequent improvement), with a market involving both mature and niche elements. Competition is multi-faceted (rather than dominated by new product development as in the quick case). The company is a market follower that does not have enough technical ability to take a lead. Top concerns included “global competition”, “decreasing new products time to market”, “shorter delivery time”, “change of product technology”, “higher quality expectation”, and “customers move towards one-stop purchase”. As a market follower, the company’s strategy emphasised “flexibility” and “responsiveness to changes”. The proactive case is similar in terms of characteristics and top concerns to the responsive case; however, as a market leader the company adopts a strategy that not only places importance on quickness, flexibility, and responsiveness, but also on proactively creating changes and partnering with suppliers and customers. In terms of action plans, the study found in all three cases that companies do have action plans, and the plans appear to correlate with their characteristics, drivers, and strategies adopted. The quick case, for example, focus on innovation at all levels, patents, technology capability, AMT and mass-customisation, flexible teams and educated people to deliver the capabilities of “customer focus” and “rapid new product development”. The responsive case emphasises “involving customer in product development”, “supplier integration”, “flexible manufacturing processes”, “flexible team-based organisation”, “continuously trained people”, and using IS to support product development, manufacturing and integration with customers and suppliers, to deliver the “flexibility” and “responsiveness” capabilities. The proactive case combined programs used by quick and responsive cases with additional ones delivering “proactiveness” and “partnership” capabilities. This agrees with findings from the taxonomy that proactive players compete along both “quickness” and “change proficiency” dimensions while quick and responsive players compete along each of the dimensions. The study focused on typical cases. It is expected that there will be variations within each cluster, particularly near the boundaries between clusters. It would be interesting to find how company characteristics, drivers, strategic focuses as well as action plans will vary across the boundaries of clusters, and what underlining forces are driving the transition.