Classification of Competitive Priorities in Small and Medium sized Manufacturing Enterprises
Paper in proceeding, 2008

Today Small and Medium sized Manufacturing Enterprises (SMMEs) face severe competition from low cost countries. SMMEs must find their market and master manufacturing outputs such as cost, delivery, flexibility, and quality. This paper focuses on competitive priorities that affect the manufacturing system in SMMEs and the aim of the paper is to identify which competitive priorities are strengths and weaknesses for these companies. The study has been performed at industries of different sizes and type to classify the manufacturing outputs. The result of the study shows that flexibility and innovativeness are strengths, while cost and delivery are weaknesses since they depend on the lack of skilled personnel, lack of performance measurements and time. Quality is ranked as one of the most important priorities in the literature, but the study identified quality as neither a strength nor a weakness. Many of the companies in the study do not have control of, nor do they measure the competitive priories, which affect the companies negatively. To remain competitive the small companies must know which manufacturing outputs are the order winners and control the order winning competitive priorities. The competitive priorities must be analysed further to understand which the suitable manufacturing outputs are for small companies today.

SMME

competitive priorities

manufacturing system

subcontractor

Author

Malin E S Löfving

Chalmers, Product and Production Development, Production Systems

Mats Winroth

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Supply and Operations Management

Published in

Proceedings of the Swedish Production Symposium 2008

Categorizing

Subject Categories

Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics

More information

Created

10/6/2017