Hill, Terry (1990) Manufacturing strategy : developments in approach and analysis. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

For established manufacturing nations, increased competitive pressure has
been the way of life since the late 1970s. For the most part however,
production decision making in manufacturing industry has not changed to
meet these new challenges. It usually takes a subordinate strategic role to
the marketing and finance functions with the consequence that it accepts a
reactive role in the corporate debate.
The outcome is that strategic initiatives and developments are predominantly
based on corporate marketing-decisions at the "front end" with
manufacturing being forced to react at the "back end" of the debate. Since
manufacturing managers come late into these discussions, it is difficult for
them to successfully influence corporate decisions. All too often, the result is
the formulation and later development of strategies which manufacturing is
unable to successfully support. That is not to say that this happens for want
of trying - strong is the work ethic in the manufacturing culture. However, if
the basic link between the manufacturing processes and infrastructure (ie
manufacturing strategy) and the market is not strategically sound, then the
business will suffer.
There are many reasons why manufacturing is typically reactive in the
strategic debate. One important factor is the lack of appropriate concepts and
language with which to explain or contribute to corporate decisions. This
research has been undertaken to help redress this deficiency.
The work began in the early 1980s. Upto that time, both the professional and
academic contributions to the field of manufacturing strategy principally
concerned statements which highlighted the problem and alerted
manufacturing industry as a whole to its size and potential. However, there
were in addition some important early pointers as to ways of overcoming the
inadequacy of production's contribution to strategy formulation as well as
some alternative approaches which firms needed to consider as ways of
improving their overall performance. The inability of the production
executive to contribute appropriate functional inputs provided the stimulus
to undertake this work and to endeavour to build on initial insights as a way
of taking forward the subject area of manufacturing strategy.
The core of this thesis concerns these developments. Reported here are three
contributions to this field of study all of which have been tested in different
firms and are increasingly being used by academics, consultants and
businesses as a way of helping to gain essential insights into what is a
complex problem.
The three facets are:
• Typically, corporate strategies are composites of functional statements
which are inadequately debated one with another in order to understand
and test the coherence of the approaches proposed. The result
is that the opportunity to fashion corporate strategies supported by
all the functions within a business is not adequately pursued. In
addition, the necessity to develop corporate strategy in this way and
the advantages which ensue have gone unrecognised
• The reactive role of manufacturing results in a lack of strategic
direction within this function. As a result, typical developments and
investments tend to take the form of operational responses undertaken
without strategic context. One outcome of the research is a methodology
which provides a way in which a business can develop a manufacturing
strategy which links manufacturing developments and investments
to the needs of its agreed markets. Two applications of this are provided
in Chapter 4
• It is most important for an industrial company to recognise that it is
attempting to support the inherently changing nature of its markets
with manufacturing investments the characteristics of which are fixed
in nature and will not change without further investments and developments.
Product profiling is a methodology for enabling companies to
assess the current level of match between its markets and manufacturing
and to recognise the extent to which decisions will effect this in the future.
Examples of its application illustrating different sources of mismatch
are given in Chapter 5

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Business planning, Manufacturing industries, Marketing
Official Date:	December 1990
Dates:	Date Event December 1990 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	School of Industrial and Business Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Extent:	[8], 266 leaves
Language:	eng

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