Coping with Low Production Volumes and Very Low Variety in Pakistani Automobile Industry-A Normative Model

摘要

Manufacturing sector is the second largest sector of the economy contributing more than 17% of GDP and engaging 11% of employed labor force in Pakistan. Basic manufacturing sector can be classified into process industry (PI) and discrete parts manufacturing industry (DPMI). Process industries are mass production units with very limited variety. These industries offer a unique product line and have fixed processes, routings and planning. On the other hand discrete parts manufacturing units can have many different models in their product line. For economic manufacturing, the optimum combinations of Volume-Variety exists I.e. job shop, batch production system or mass production. In this paper, the authors have looked at the typical production volumes and varieties of the discrete part manufacturing in Pakistan and have argued that there exists very low variety and low to medium production volumes for this particular sector. This is obviously uneconomic because they are operating below the break-even quantities. This calls for investigating ways and strategies to effectively cope with the situation. We suggest a triple strategy approach. The three strategies are not mutually exclusive-a subsequent strategy assumes that the previous strategy has been executed earlier and its benefits/ results still exist when the subsequent strategy is implemented. The three proposed strategies are: A good governance (cost cutting) strategy, an automation (technology driven) strategy and an export (value adding) strategy.