Research On Manufacturing Strategy Elements Structural Model

Manufacturing function is a fundamentally key part in a manufacturing firms. It can be a powerful weapon for corporate competition and gain competitive advantage to deploy manufacturing systems effectively. With the advancement of global economy, the level of integration of internaiton market, the progression of cooperation and competition on internation economy, the extension of manufacturing and marketing boundary is both higher.Facing this fierce competitive situation, the function and importance of manufacturing system is increasingly stressed by practicer and researcher. In the process of manufacturing strategy theory research, the components of manufacturing stategy and their interrelationship is always its core research area. By the reason of difficulty to study, most researchers pay mainly attention to focus on the components of manufacturing strategy and the relationship between competitive priorities. The research on the relationship of manufactuirng strategic elements and executive elements is fewer, furthermore, lognitudinal study on this relationship is not involved. This paper use the database of International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) to make an exploratory lognitudinal study on congruent relationship between manufacturing strategic elements.Firstly, the structure of manufacturing strategy elements is lognitudinally been studied descriptively. The structure goes through three stages, which varied from simple form which implement manufacturing practices are closely focused on reducing cost, then implement manufacturing practices for reducing cost and improving quality, to complex form which manufacturing practices are focused on multiple competitive priorities. The structure of manufacturing strategy elements are delineated by graphical. forms and discussed the main causes which come into being the different forms of structure.Secondly, the paper puts forward a model to the structure of manufacturing strategy elements, which match manufacturing strategic elements and manufacturing executive elements can achieve competitive advantage. Then their components in this model have been analyzed, the factors which influence the structure of manufacturing strategy elements been discussed. After this, data for empirical research have been extracted and checked from database of IMSS, and examined their reliability and validity. It is satisfiable from the results of CFA (Certified Factor Ananysis) for competitive priority.Again, empirical research using linear regression analysis and structural equation model indicates that quality is always the most important and crucial competitive priority. It shows higher positive correlation among priorityies other than cost. It always performs stronger relationship between competitive priorities and manufacturing practices on quality, service and flexibility, but cost and delivery reveal less. Comparatively, firms which implemented manufacturing practices focused on two or three competitive priorities exceed firms which decentralized on more priorities.Finally, the variational forms of structure and their discrepancy under different condition such as region, scale, and level of economy development have been analyzed respectively. European pattern is differed slightly from North American under region. Structure of big enterprise is better than small and middle enterprise under scale. High level countries have more complex structure than low level's.