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

Abstract

Production and operation strategy is one of the functional<br />level strategies of the organization, which needs to be linked to business<br />strategy and other functional strategies. Current literature divides<br />production and operation into two main branches: manufacturing and<br />service. The role and importance of manufacturing strategy in the successful<br />performance of organizations was initially emphasized by Wickham<br />Skinner's work in 1969. In the following years, various studies<br />have been conducted in this field, which could be divided into two main<br />streams: (i) Content studies, which includes research on the reason and<br />purpose of the subject (i.e. why manufacturing strategy?); (ii) Process<br />studies that deal with the methodology of formulating manufacturing<br />strategy (i.e. the know-how of planning manufacturing strategy). In<br />this paper, after a literature review on various researches on manufacturing<br />strategy, including its relation to strategies at corporate and<br />business levels and various models for its formulation, a model has been<br />developed and introduced to empower the linkage between manufacturing<br />strategy from one hand and Business and corporate strategy from<br />the other hand. The developed model then Combined to a decision Table<br />and align the manufacturing strategy with Business Strategy. To<br />validate the model developed by the researcher, it was introduced to<br />experts in the automotive industry of Iran, who supported the model<br />descriptively and analytically.