Strategic Manufacturing Management: Restructuring Wasteful Production to World Class

The strategic management of manufacturing requires a more comprehensive parad just the current generally accepted one.This is to seek to ensure that the manufacturing capabilities of the firm are compatible with the order winning criteria of the target market.The inability of many UK companies to be world class competitors suggests that managing manufacturing strategically continues to be practised ineffectually.How can the complexity of this task be reduced?The purpose of this article is to describe a methodology which has been found to facilitate strategic manufacturing management.A model has been developed that links the critical manufacturing performance improvements required to sustain each of the generic competitive strategies that may be pursued.The model is designed to help create a vision for the manufacturing operations of a business which is essential for its strategic management.How the use of the model can simplify strategic manufacturing management in practice is illustrated by describing a case study of how a wasteful manufacturing operation was transformed into one that gained a cost and time-based competitive advantage.The paper is the result of research carried out in twelve UK manufacturing companies during the last three years.