Question

1. Is it important to have a manufacturing strategy to be successful in the simulation, and if so, why / how? If you have implemented a manufacturing strategy, what conditions were the reason(s) for your thinking? Just need bullet points.

Answer 1

Manufacturing strategy has increasingly been regarded by academics and practitioners as having an important contribution to make to enhance competitiveness. The growth of the literature in manufacturing strategy has matched the growth of interest in the area. Within the literature three main reasons are identified for this newly found importance.

The first is the increased pressure owing to the growing international manufacturing competitiveness made more intense by the recent movement towards globalisation. The second is the increased potential to be gained from the development of new manufacturing technologies, the potential of which grows much faster than our ability to use it for competitive benefits and, the third is the development of a better understanding of the strategic role of manufacturing. Five characteristics can be listed to help understand the need for a strategic management of the manufacturing function:

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Manufacturing in general involves the bulk of the company's assets and human resources

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Many decisions regarding manufacturing resources require a long time to take effect therefore requiring a long term outlook of the future to support them

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Once made, many of these decisions will normally take a long time and substantial amounts of resources to revert

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Manufacturing decisions directly affect the way companies can compete in the market place because it is increasingly accepted that there is not such a thing as a “best way” to manage manufacturing resources - different configurations of manufacturing resources will result in different levels of manufacturing performance in different aspects (e.g. delivery, flexibility, quality and cost)

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Manufacturing decisions have to support and be supported by other functions in order to properly support the business strategy of the company, therefore requiring strategic orientation

Manufacturing strategy can be defined as a framework whose objective is the increased competitiveness of the organisation: to achieve this it should aim at designing, organising, managing and developing the company's manufacturing resources and shape a consistent pattern of manufacturing decisions in order that they can result in an adequate mix of performance characteristics which will allow the company to compete effectively in the future.

Manufacturing strategy term encompasses everything it takes to satisfy customers, from determinative that product they're going to get, to deciding the way to manufacture them, and coming up with for his or her delivery. There has been goodish attention over the years on modern ideas of producing strategy. ancient producing, production coming up with and management, simply in time management, and total quality management initiatives have all been adopted and tailored, as applicable, to suite the requirements of producing corporations. moreover, new varieties of offer chain management, wherever long cooperative partnerships between customers, suppliers and producers are developed. Terms like world category producing, and lean producing are accustomed differentiate these varieties of manufacture from ancient varieties of production. a lot of recently, however, the conception of agile producing has emerged whereby structure thinness should be matched with the pliability to retort to dynamic market conditions and competitive.