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.