Study On The Organizational Change Model And Decision-making Authority Allocation Of Iot-based Manufacturing Enterprises

The application of the emerging information technology of internet of things(IoT)in manufacturing industry can dramatically enhance enterprises' market competencies and promote the overall improvement of organizational performance.As such,it has received much attention from both theoretical research and management practice.The acquisition and delivery of product life-cycle information of IoT-based manufacturing enterprises,compared to that under traditional manufacturing environment,have the following three typical characteristics:(1)comprehensive detection of product life-cycle information;(2)more precise acquisition and analysis of on-site data to achieve delicacy management of manufacturing processes;(3)real-time sharing and rapid transmission of information among organizational hierarchies and cooperative enterprises.Rapid and precise decisions contribute to improving firm's agility and flexibility,thereby seizing transient market opportunities.Manufacturing enterprises have to make corresponding organizational structure adjustment in aspects of management level and management span combining their decision items and limited resource occupation,and focus on the structure of internal governance and optimal allocation of decision-making authorities considering both decision speed and accuracy.Supported by the emerging information technology such as the IoT,millions of manufacturing enterprises are currently involved in dynamic virtual enterprises.Each cooperative enterprise contributes its core skills and shares common market risks,aiming at seizing rapidly changing market opportunities.To study the relationships between the occupation of various superior resources and overall performances of the virtual enterprise and to analyze the moderating effects of allocation of decision-making authorities among cooperative enterprises on these relationships are beneficial for providing managerial suggestions for reasonable allocation of superior resources and decision-making authorities,which also have important managerial and practical significances in promoting efficient utilization of scarce resources and overall performance of the virtual enterprise.This dissertation systematically studies the organizational change model and the decision-making authority allocation problem of manufacturing enterprises under IoT environment.A general organizational change model is first refined according to the actual situation of a typical manufacturing enterprise when applying IoT.Using real options approach,we analyze the costs and benefits of a two-stage organizational change model.The market advantage of the IoT technology is demonstrated through a pricing and service investment competition model in an asymmetric dual-channel supply chain.The optimal decision-making authority allocation scheme of strategic,tactic and operational decision items across different organizational levels within a manufacturing enterprise is then investigated.From a hierarchical perspective,we analyze the decision-making authority centralization behavior of each organizational level,and further propose a decision-making centralization mechanism to promote the fully implementation of firm's optimal decision-making authority scheme.Finally,we conduct an empirical study to explore the influences of superior resources occupied by member enterprises of the collaborative virtual enterprise on its overall firm performances.The moderating effects of allocation of strategic and operational decision-making authorities on these influences are further analyzed.We summarize the research contributions and main innovative points of this dissertation as follows:(1)We refine a general organizational change model and the organizational change routes of manufacturing enterprises under IoT environment.A real options model of manufacturing enterprises when invest and implement IoT development project is established from cost-benefit analysis perspective.We find that initial organizational change has important promoting effects on the implementation of IoT development project.This paper refines a general organizational change model of manufacturing enterprises by analyzing the typical and actual case of organizational change from Jianghuai Auto Company when applying the IoT.A two-stage real options model is established to investigate the optimal investment decisions and maximal expected total profits of the IoT development project of manufacturing enterprises.Under the binomial lattice tree framework,the internal causes and significance of organizational change when manufacturing enterprises invest and implement IoT development project are investigated by comparing the investment costs and future benefits of the IoT development project in different situations.(2)The product pricing and service investment competition between asymmetric manufacturing enterprises in duopoly market is studied.We establish a Stackelberg game model of product pricing and service investment competition.The comparative market competition advantages of IoT product are demonstrated through a numerical experiment.This paper analyzes the expected utility functions of each manufacturer considering the customer service characteristics of the IoT products.A multi-period product pricing and service investment competition Stackelberg game model between IoT-based and traditional manufacturing enterprises is established under market demand uncertainties.The optimal wholesale price of raw materials and product pricing and service investment strategies of participants are solved using backward induction.We analyze the effects of risk-averse coefficients and price sensitive coefficients on the optimal decisions of the manufacturers,and find that the decisions of either manufacturer are proportional to the price sensitive coefficient of its rival,while inversely proportional to both risk-averse coefficients and its own price sensitive coefficient.Our numerical experiment demonstrates the market advantages of the IoT products in long-term product competition.(3)We study the optimal allocation problem of decision-making authorities among different hierarchies of manufacturing enterprises under IoT environment.We provide a decision-making authority quantization method and a multi-objective optimization model and a sequential game model of decision-making authority allocation for the internal governance of organizational structure.The organizational change tendency of manufacturing enterprises is indicated to be flattening.This paper establishes a multi-objective optimization model for the allocation of strategic,tactic and operational decision-making authorities,and proposes a sequential game model to analyze the optimal centralization behavior of different organizational levels.The optimal decision-making authority allocation scheme is solved with the objectives of maximization of total expected decision benefits,minimization of total losses of unscheduled decision items and minimization of the maximal decision time considering both information transmission characteristics and firm resource constrains.By establishing a sequential game model of decision-making authority centralization behavior of different hierarchical levels,an effective incentive mechanism is proposed to promote the efficient implementation of firms' optimal decision-making authority allocation scheme.We analyze the effects of factors such as the decision information delivery accuracy rate,subjective weights of the optimization objectives on the optimal allocation scheme of enterprise's decision-making authorities.The changing tendency of management span and management levels of manufacturing enterprises is further explored to improve the decision-making efficiency.(4)We conduct empirically study of the allocation of decision-making authorities among member enterprises of the IoT-based virtual enterprise.The impacts of member enterprises' superior resource occupation on the overall performance of the IoT-based virtual enterprise are investigated.Moderating effects of decision-making authority allocation among cooperative enterprises on these relationships are also analyzed.Drawing upon resource-basic view and based on rigorous review of previous literature,this paper proposes several research hypotheses.We then focus on 141 small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises under IoT environment in central China to test the hypotheses.The results suggest that the basic resource is not significantly related whereas information and operational resources are positively associated with overall firm performances.Furthermore,the strategic decision-making authority allocation facilitates the influences of superior information resource and operational resource on overall firm performances.Meanwhile,the operational decision-making authority allocation positively moderates the influences of operational resource on overall firm performances.This study provides important theoretic guidance for manufacturing enterprises to cultivate and acquire superior resources,and allocate decision-making authority reasonably for effective utilization and coordination of these resources.