STRATEGO - Manufacturing strategies supporting competitiveness in small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises - A Handbook

Report, 2014

This handbook presents results from the research project STRATEGO – Manufacturing strategies supporting competitiveness in small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMME). The project was carried out by researchers at the School of Engineering, Jönköping University, and Chalmers University of Technology, and was funded by VINNOVA within the program Production Strategies and Models for Product Realisation. A number of companies also participated in the project, for which we are deeply grateful! Thanks to your generous sharing of experiences and patience in testing new versions of the tool, we came a little bit further. We also want to thank Mikael Cederfeldt for the Excel-programming, Mario Celegin for all illustrations, and Josanna Holmstrand at Husqvarna AB for contributing with photographs. Finally, we want to express our sincere gratitude to VINNOVA for giving us the opportunity to carry out this research project and especially to our project officer Margareta Groth. The background to the project is that much of the work on manufacturing strategies has had the basic starting point in large companies and their conditions. Since SMMEs are in majority, and contribute considerably to financial development, it was considered important to focus on their competitiveness. Thus, there is a need to make knowledge on manufacturing strategies available and useful event o SMMEs, which is the aim of the STRATEGO project. We hope that we have contributed to that aim. Together with the participating companies, we have developed a framework aiming to support companies in their work with manufacturing strategies. The framework consists of two parts, an analytical tool and a collection of guidelines. The STRATEGO tool and its guidelines are being presented in this handbook.