Brian Vejrum Wæhrens

Strategic Roles of Manufacturing

Purpose – The challenges facing industrial enterprises include coping with an increased distribution of activities and the related need to deal with task interdependencies, as well as coping with uncertainty and complexity. This opens for a discussion of current thinking and practices of manufacturing and its strategic role. The aim of the paper is to explore future changes in strategic roles of manufacturing.Design/methodology/approach – A review of the literature on manufacturing strategy has focused on different ways of positioning manufacturing as a means for identifying and defining the strategic roles of manufacturing in an industrial company. To understand how industrial companies have dealt with some of the global challenges and have changed their strategic roles of manufacturing over a period of 3‐7 years, interviews are carried out in six small and medium‐sized companies, representing different industries, such as textile, mechanical and electronic industries. The case stories form a basis for i...

Re-Orienting the Corporate Entrepreneurial Journey: Exploring the Role of Middle Management

In this article we report research on the implementation of an increased exploitative market orientation in explorative technology-driven firms, and how the interaction between middle management and the internal context shapes this process. It appears that middle managers play an important role in balancing planned and emergent activities, reconciling market and technological understandings, and negotiating and sanctioning ideas. These roles do not happen automatically. Dominant logics, mindsets and meanings, developed and successful in the past, ‘talk back’. Managerial systems and processes supporting the transition to more and more successful market exploitation are not automatically accepted. Rather, all these and similar changes need to be socially negotiated. In that process, the opportunities and incentives for middle managers to reach beyond their formal job and to engage in the organizational sense-making process play a key role.

Offshore Outsourcing of Production: An Exploratory Study of Process and Effects in Danish Companies

Purpose – This paper is concerned with the realisation process of offshore outsourcing activities. The authors seek to understand the dynamic effects facing companies launching offshore outsourcing initiatives and to identify different types of mitigating efforts, which companies instigate to deal with these.Design/methodology/approach – Two exploratory case studies are developed based on interviews, documents, and site visits.Findings – The paper builds an understanding of patterns emerging from offshore outsourcing paths developments and discusses their organisational implications. It is proposed that the decision to dispatch standardised production tasks to parties overseas has implications over and beyond the initial intentions, which challenge the strategic scope and operationalisation of inter‐unit roles and responsibilities.Practical implications – The paper suggests that the process, and particularly the mitigation‐oriented agency that take place as the process unfolds throughout the company, dese...

Accessing offshoring advantages: what and how to offshore

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of factors that affect offshoring performance results. To do so, this paper focuses on the access to location-specific advantages, rather than solely on the properties of the offshoring company, its strategy or environment. Assuming that different levels of synergy may exist between particular offshoring strategic decisions (choosing offshore outsourcing or captive offshoring and the type of function) and different offshoring advantages, this work advocates that the actual fact of realization of certain offshoring advantages (getting or not getting access to them) is a more reliable predictor of offshoring success. Design/methodology/approach – A set of hypotheses derived from the extant literature is tested on the data from a quantitative survey of 1,143 Scandinavian firms. Findings – The paper demonstrates that different governance modes and types of offshored function indeed provide different levels of access to different types of loca...

Dynamic roles and locations of manufacturing

Purpose – The principal objective of this paper is to relate functional nodes of production and innovation in global operations networks. The authors aim to capture the implications of changing strategic roles and locations of manufacturing for innovation capabilities. Design/methodology/approach – The authors draw on the operations networks literature and use mixed methods of enquiry, including case studies, workshops and survey techniques. Part of the empirical base of the study is a series of workshops and an examination of 14 Danish companies that have experienced radical changes in their operations configurations. To provide a more complete view of these developments, the authors complement the qualitative methodology with a survey of an overall sample of 675 Danish and 410 Swedish companies. Findings – On the basis of the findings from the survey, the series of workshops and case studies of Danish companies presented in this paper, the authors find that although the potential benefits of global disp...

The replication of expansive production knowledge: The role of templates and principles

Purpose – With the aim to support offshore production line replication, the specific purpose of this paper is to explore the use of templates and principles to transfer expansive productive knowledge embedded in a production line and understand the contingencies that influence the mix of these approaches.Design/methodology/approach – A total of two case studies are introduced. Empirical data were collected over a period of two years based on interviews and participating observations.Findings – The findings show that knowledge transfer within the replication of a production line is a stepwise expansive process; and rather than being viewed as alternative approaches, templates and principles should be seen as complementary once the transfer motive moves beyond pure replication.Research limitations/implications – The concepts introduced in this paper were derived from two Danish cases. While acceptable for theory exploration, the small sample size is an obvious limitation for generalisation.Practical implica...

Closing global material loops: Initial insights into firm-level challenges

Summary Sharing and exchanging waste materials between industrial actors, a practice known as industrial symbiosis (IS), has been identified as a key strategy for closing material loops. This article adopts a critical view on geographical proximity and external coordinators—two key enablers of IS. By “uncovering” a case where both enablers are absent, this study seeks to explore firm-level challenges of IS. We adopt an exploratory case-study approach at a cement manufacturer who engages in cross-border IS without the support of external coordinators. Our research presents insights into two key areas of IS: (1) setting up the initial IS exchange and (2) improving the performance of existing IS exchanges. Moreover, our research provides initial insights into the underlying nature of the related firm-level challenges and explores how internal coordination between manufacturing and purchasing may or may not act as a substitute for geographical proximity and external coordinators. In doing so, our insights into firm-level challenges of long-distance IS exchanges contribute to closing global material loops by increasing the number of potential circular pathways.

Offshoring practices of Danish and Swedish SMEs: effects on operations configuration

This paper examines how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) configure their operations on the global scale and how this affects their home bases in terms of operations requirements and priorities. In order to relate SMEs’ offshoring initiatives with their operations configuration attributes, we draw on the operations networks literature and survey responses from 675 Danish and 410 Swedish companies. On the basis of the survey results, we find that although the SMEs are less experienced and less advanced in their offshoring ventures than large companies, they are building dispersed operations networks. Although still in their infancy, these networks are, as expected, creating new demands for their home bases in terms of demands for formalisation of work processes, systems development and managerial capability related to orchestrating operations across national borders, but more fundamentally, it also challenges the strategic foundations of the home base. Based on these observations, we discuss future global operations management challenges, practices and priorities of SMEs.

Offshoring White-Collar Work: An Explorative Investigation of the Processes and Mechanisms in Two Danish Manufacturing Firms

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: to explain why white-collar service work in manufacturing firms is increasingly subject to offshoring and to understand the effects of this process on work integration mechanisms. The empirical part of the study is based on two case studies of Danish manufacturers. First, the chapter finds that drivers of white-collar work offshoring in many respects are parallel to those of the earlier wave of blue-collar work offshoring, that is, cost minimisation and resource seeking. Second, due to the interdependence of white-collar tasks with the rest of the organisation, our results suggest that white-collar offshoring in manufacturing firms poses higher requirements to the organisational configuration and capabilities compared with blue-collar work. We conceptualise the effects of white-collar work offshoring in a framework relating white-collar work to integration mechanisms companies instigate to manage it on a global scale.

The impact of distance on headquarters’ network management capabilities

Purpose The ability of an organisation’s headquarters (HQ) to bring value to and manage a globally dispersed multinational enterprise has been questioned in the existing literature. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that HQ-subsidiary distance is an important factor that affects such ability; this report also investigates the impact of distance on the HQ’s network management capabilities in the context of a global organisation’s evolution. Design/methodology/approach In this study, a single company was chosen to take part in a retrospective, longitudinal case study that highlighted two embedded product cases. The concept of distance was viewed as a variety of distance dimensions existing between the HQ and its subsidiaries. Findings The results indicated that distance impacted the effectiveness of the HQ’s network management capabilities by affecting HQ-subsidiary interaction and, consequently, shaping HQ’s knowledgeability about the subsidiaries’ operations. Moreover, the results suggested that the impact of such distance may shift from positive to negative over the course of a global organisation’s evolution. Research limitations/implications Although this study was explorative, some generalisability to industrial-goods companies of Scandinavian origin that have transferred activities to their owned subsidiaries may be expected. Further replication of the study using multiple case companies across various industries and countries is desirable. Originality/value This work extends the understanding of technological distance, sheds light on the conditions necessary for the HQ of a globally networked organisation to engage in value creation in the context of its evolution and contributes to the overall appreciation of distance as a factor that comprises multiple dimensions.