Relating objectives to manufacturing decisions in dynamic environments: a study of Indian and German manufacturing firms

Summary form only given, as follows. Competitive priority and corporate strategy of a firm determines the objectives of a manufacturing firm. A few of these objectives are product variety, volume flexibility, delivery, quality and cost. These objectives determine the specific decisions that must be taken on following dimensions such as plant and equipment, production planning and control, labor skills, organization structure of manufacturing divisions, level of vertical integration and nature of vendor relations. Based on the literature review, the authors outline the nature of this relationship between objectives and decisions for the manufacturing organization when objectives do not change. When objectives do not change and when they consider these objectives, i.e., product variety, volume flexibility and delivery performance, allowing them to vary at two levels, i.e., high and low, eight cases result. Later, they consider 28 dynamic cases where manufacturing objectives change on one or more dimensions. Analysis revealed that in 16 cases it required drastic changes in manufacturing decisions, and hence it was argued that these would be difficult to achieve; in 4 cases changes involved in manufacturing decisions had moderate difficulty and only in 8 cases changes in manufacturing decisions were found to be easy to achieve. A very large number of case studies would be required to verify the framework presented here, however, a pilot study involving fourteen case studies from German firms and twenty two case studies from Indian firms lent a good support to theoretical analysis carried out in this paper. In particular, they found that actual hard decisions (decisions relating to plant and equipment as collected from field) were according to theoretical predictions. However, they found organization structure of manufacturing firms (both Indian and German) was poorly related to objectives as suggested by Miles and Snow (1978). They discuss several considerations that explained these deviations. Implication of these for actual decision-makers of manufacturing organization is discussed