The Analysis of Trade-offs among Competitive Priorities in the Manufacturing: The Contrast between Developing Country and Developed Country

The concept of the "trade-off" is increasingly seen as central to operations strategy because it forms the foundation of conceptualizing the improvement process. The analysis of trade-offs among competitive priorities is one of the core issues in manufacturing strategy research. A hot debate continues over the need for trade-off in operations strategy. Some researchers call for plants to focus on a single manufacturing capability and devote their limited resources accordingly, while others claim that advanced manufacturing technology enables concurrent improvements in quality, cost, flexibility and delivery. Yet there is little empirical evidence for or against the trade-off model. There are very few published, empirical studies, which directly address the issue. In response, this study will put forward two hypothesis. In our study, we employ survey data from IMSS. We divide the countries into two parts according to its economic development level, developed countries and developing countries. After reviewing the literatures on trade-off among competitive priorities, this study utilized factor analysis to identify whether the trade-offs exist or not by investigating IMSS database. Then, we would indicate the differences between developed and developing countries on trade-offs. Our findings suggest that some of the trade-offs remain while others disappear. This is because that the trade-offs are dynamic, and we also find that, developing countries have more trade-offs than developed countries. So the economic development level will affect the trade-offs among competitive priorities. In this study, we will also talk about halo effects. We believe that competitive priorities has a similar halo effect. This effect makes measurement of "true" competitive priorities difficult. The literature on competitive priorities and the competing strategy models (trade-of versus cumulative) both underestimate and ignore the effects of halo on priority measurement. But now more and mor- e researchers pay attention to halo effects. To date, there have not been effective methods to address the problem. We agree that competitive priorities need to be improved, and we follow Kenneth K. Boyer and Marianne W. Lewis\´s approach