Business and Manufacturing Strategies: a Model for Alignment (Case Study: Iranian Automative Industry)

Subject Areas : Business Strategy

Mehrdad Hoseini shakib ¹

1 - Department of Industrial Management Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University Karaj, Iran

Received: 2014-01-20 Accepted : 2014-03-20 Published : 2015-01-01

Keywords: Production & Operation Management - Strategic Planning- Manufacturing Strategy-Strategic Alignment,

Abstract :

Production and operation strategy is one of the functionallevel strategies of the organization, which needs to be linked to businessstrategy and other functional strategies. Current literature dividesproduction and operation into two main branches: manufacturing andservice. The role and importance of manufacturing strategy in the successfulperformance of organizations was initially emphasized by WickhamSkinner’s work in 1969. In the following years, various studieshave been conducted in this field, which could be divided into two mainstreams: (i) Content studies, which includes research on the reason andpurpose of the subject (i.e. why manufacturing strategy?); (ii) Processstudies that deal with the methodology of formulating manufacturingstrategy (i.e. the know-how of planning manufacturing strategy). Inthis paper, after a literature review on various researches on manufacturingstrategy, including its relation to strategies at corporate andbusiness levels and various models for its formulation, a model has beendeveloped and introduced to empower the linkage between manufacturingstrategy from one hand and Business and corporate strategy fromthe other hand. The developed model then Combined to a decision Tableand align the manufacturing strategy with Business Strategy. Tovalidate the model developed by the researcher, it was introduced toexperts in the automotive industry of Iran, who supported the modeldescriptively and analytically.