Nuran Acur

Best manufacturing practices: What do the best‐performing companies do?

Purpose – Research on best practices suffers from some fundamental problems. The problem addressed in the article is that authors tend to postulate, rather than show, the practices they address to be best – whether these practices do indeed produce best performance is often not investigated.Design/methodology/approach – This article assumes that the best performing companies must be the ones deploying the best practices. In order to find out what are those practices, the highest performing companies in the 2002 International Manufacturing Strategy Survey database were identified, and the role 14 practices play in these companies was investigated.Findings – Process focus, pull production, equipment productivity and environmental compatibility appear to qualify as best practices. Quality management and ICT may have been best practice previously, but lost that status. E‐business, new product development (NPD), supplier strategy and outsourcing are relatively new, cannot yet be qualified as, but may develop i...

The formalisation of manufacturing strategy and its influence on the relationship between competitive objectives, improvement goals, and action plans

This paper intends to contribute to a better understanding of manufacturing strategy content by describing and analysing the content and formalisation of manufacturing strategies, and by exploring the relationships between the formalisation of manufacturing strategy, business/competitive objectives, improvement goals, and action plans. The study is based on the data from the third International Manufacturing Strategy Survey, which was conducted in more than 20 countries. The analysis shows that in companies with a formal strategy competitive priorities, improvement goals and action programs are significantly better aligned in companies without such a strategy. This finding is encouraging for operations management scholars, as it suggests that after 30‐odd years Skinners missing link has been re‐discovered, and it supports OM practitioners in their ongoing battle to safeguard the position of manufacturing in the corporate debate.

Patterns of change in manufacturing strategy configurations

Purpose – The paper aims to address the question of how and how often companies change their manufacturing strategy in the medium and long run, thus addressing a lack of evidence in the literature.Design/methodology/approach – This paper explores the movements made by companies among four manufacturing strategy configurations drawn from the literature (market‐based, product‐based, capability‐based and price‐based configuration). Analyses are based on three longitudinal samples from the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) database.Findings – Results show that while strategic configurations are rather stable, many companies do indeed change strategy and identifies which patterns of change prevail. Product‐based strategy is the most‐widely spread and most stable strategy. Capability‐based competition is the rising star. The market‐based strategy is struggling and price‐based competition is on its way out.Research limitations/implications – The main limitation is the small size of longitudinal ...

Assessment of strategy formulation: how to ensure quality in process and outcome

Purpose – Today, industrial firms need to cope with competitive challenges related to innovation, dynamic responses, knowledge sharing, etc. by means of effective and dynamic strategy formulation. In light of these challenges, the purpose of the paper is to present and evaluate an assessment tool for strategy formulation processes that ensures high quality in process and outcome.Design/methodology/approach – A literature review was conducted to identify success criteria for strategy formulation processes. Then, a simple questionnaire and assessment tool was developed and used to test the validity of the success criteria through face‐to‐face interviews with 46 managers, workshops involving 40 managers, and two in‐depth case studies. The success criteria have been slightly modified due to the empirical results, to yield the assessment tool.Findings – The resulting assessment tool integrates three generic approaches to strategy assessment, namely the goal‐centred, comparative and improvement approaches, as f...

Managing strategy through business processes

The work presented in this paper, following an in depth review of literature, developed a set of requirements for a Dynamic Strategy Management Process. Having evaluated the existing strategy management frameworks, models, methodologies, tools and techniques, the research concluded that although all approaches reviewed collectively met all the requirements, individually none of the approaches fulfilled all of these requirements. To fulfil these dynamic strategy management process requirements, PROPHESY ( P rocess O riented P erformance H eaded S trategy) was developed. The paper describes in some detail, the evaluation of the PROPHESY process and demonstrates its application through a case study. The paper concludes that strategy should focus on creating value that is independent for each business unit. This means developing horizontal strategies that have objectives of co-ordinating business processes and developing objectives that encourage the sharing of resources and skills.

A balanced approach to strategy process

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how business process‐based approach (PROPHESY) facilitates integration of resource‐based and market‐based approaches to strategy management. The paper begins by presenting resource‐based and market‐based strategy management approaches generally. It extends earlier research by examining the linkages between markets and resources as practised by three case study companies representing a cross‐section of the manufacturing industry. It continues with a discussion on the reasons behind the choice of the criteria used for cross case analysis. Although the results are exploratory, they provide a comparative analysis of how market‐based strategies could relate and integrate with resource‐based strategies through business processes.

Understanding inter-organizational decision coordination

Purpose – This article develops a theoretical framework to investigate the interaction and coordination of decision‐making processes in a supply chain with multiple and inter‐dependent suppliers and customers.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents three longitudinal case studies on the decision coordination processes between a European toy supplier and three retailers.Findings – The case studies found different mental models, decision‐making behaviours, coordination behaviours and ordering behaviours even though the toy supplier and the three retailers observed quite the same material flow behaviours. The study found explanations for these diverse behaviours by analysing the mental models and decision‐making behaviours of each involved party.Originality/value – The findings explain the conditions which lead to undesirable mental models and decision‐making behaviours which affect the coordination of decisions among supply chain members.

How do SMEs use open innovation when developing new business models

Access to external knowledge to accelerate innovation is becoming a key business process as firms continue to recognize the importance of going beyond their boundaries when advancing products and services. This chapter considers the increasingly important case of technology-driven service innovation in the context of crowdsourcing for innovation. Drawing on an in-depth crowdsourcing for innovation project, this chapter analyzes the development of service innovation with the crowd. The data is anchored and grounded in observations, interviews, workshops, and an online idea platform. We contribute to an acknowledged aspect, neglected in the literature, understanding how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) actually use crowds in service innovation, when moving from a product-based to service-based business.

A Bibliometric Review of the Innovation Intermediary: Mapping Roles and Setting a Research Agenda (Forthcoming)

The development of innovation management practices toward openness and emerging socio-economic models have changed the roles and supporting activities of innovation intermediaries. This paper aims to review the extant research to explore the role of innovation intermediaries, map the current knowledge and outline a future research agenda. Utilizing the novel quantitative literature review approach of bibliographic coupling, examining 164 journal articles, the paper presents a robust analysis of the intellectual streams and key concepts underpinning innovation intermediaries. This is the first time that a quantitative review method has been used to analyses this research area and it provides an opportunity for new insights to complement previous qualitative reviews. This paper makes a contribution to the on-going debate by proposing a framework that explains the role of innovation intermediaries: knowledge broker, knowledge transfer enabler, orchestrator, and open innovation facilitator, and the functions embedded with the roles at different levels of unit analysis, i.e., firm, industry, and national. The paper concludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the framework and details key areas for future research.

Process oriented, performance headed strategy

Prophesy (Process Oriented, Performance Headed Strategy) develops a model that builds-up a detailed picture of how organisations deploy and review their strategies and objectives and turn them into plans and actions at all levels of the organisation. The model helps to capture corporate objectives, performance measures and financial information as references for future business improvement.