2 Product Strategy

摘要

Almost 50 years ago, Skinner (1969) recognized that many US manufacturers lack a proper connection between manufacturing decisions and corporate strategy. Thus, he suggested a new "top-down" approach (in contrast to Fredrick W. Taylor's conventional bottom-up production management system) that starts with a systematic collaboration of manufacturing engineers, executives, and top management in order to determine a "competitive strategy" This strategy needs to be designed based on trade-offs between cost, quality, time, and customer satisfaction. The U.S. manufacturers' failure to make such trade-offs was further highlighted by Skinner (1974), who argued that companies should first prioritize their competitive capabilities and explicitly determine what they can really compete on, and then set up a focused factory to support their competitive strategy. Subsequent studies further developed the principles and applications of these four main competitive priorities/capabilities, namely: cost, quality, flexibility, and delivery (Fine and Hax, 1985; Hayes and Wheelwright, 1984; Roth and Van Der Velde, 1991; Swink and Way, 1995; Wheelwright, 1984). A very simple and short definition of the priorities is as follows: