What might be the competitive operations and technology strategies in the global
race for Finland when the world economy is growing especially in Asia ('China ...
INTEGRATION OF OPERATIONS STRATEGY INTO DYNAMIC SENSE & RESPONSE RESOURCE ALLOCATIONS BY TECHNOLOGY RANKINGS - OPERATIONALIZING THE FINNISH MANUFACTURING AND SERVICE POTENTIALS IN GLOBAL RACE. What might be the competitive operations and technology strategies in the global race for Finland when the world economy is growing especially in Asia (‘China Effect’)? This study proposal is basing on the Research Professor period 2006-07 at UoVaasa on Global Manufacturing Strategies created separate results basing on partly qualitative and partly quantitative case studies and surveys published actively in 2007-11. These separate results should be integrated by the applicant’s international research network to help the Finnish companies operationalize their business potentials in the global race.The study tries to find out the operations strategies by ‘Sense and Response’ (S&R) resource allocations and vice versa. Miles & Snow (Miles, Snow, 1978 and Takala, 2007) competitive categories (prospector, analyzer, defender or reactor) might be integrated into S&R resource and technology allocations by the attributes of S&R based OP (striving for operations strategies) questionnaire utilized in RAL Model (Takala, 2007) according to the influence of the Cost, Time, Quality or Flexibility attributes to OP performance (Figure 1).
Figure 1: RAL Model and OP Questionnaire attributes from S&R.
The importance of different technological levels (Basic, Core or Spearhead), in technology-based businesses, affects a lot the strategy implementation by the knowledge required, and supports the company’s success in the competitive category chosen. TEAK Case (Figure 2) shows technology rankings for every OP attribute when the same total value (100%) has assumed to be given for all of them (in practice different total values have to be introduced from general strategies).
Figure 2: Technology Ranking (basing mainly on the knowledge required, TEAK Case).
TEAK case with the analytical models proposed (in the forthcoming TIIM’2012 paper) gives a chance to build dynamically the future change of the operation strategy according to the technology/knowledge change (Figures 3). By critical (reds, yellows) to non-critical (greens) we can define the company’s approach to such resources like knowledge and technology according to their role in the general performance (marked with grey color on Figure 3). As can be seen from the grey ones, some of the critical ones become non-critical (to be new greens) or even more critical (reds or yellows) and some of them vice versa.
Figure3. Performance based critical factor indexes (BCFI) from S&R analysis (TEAK Case, forthcoming TIIM2012 publ).
Through the validation of the analytical models by methodological triangulation (interviews, archival analyses etc.), and statistical verification of the integration idea by utilizing many more samples from comparative cases and surveys, especially from metal and machine building industries and knowledge intensive business services, it might be possible to find out the correlation between the technology and operations strategies preferred in the global and macro level (strategic) contexts, to be utilized for dynamic decisions about the operations strategies by specific resource reallocations (Figure 3) by the future oriented S&R. The study will be carried out in Finland and other countries by the applications oriented research cases and surveys by UoVaasa university partners (in Slovakia, Slovenia, Netherland, China, Thailand, Malaysia etc.) with visiting and adjunct professorship periods together the applicant’s research group of many Finnish and foreign MSc and PhD (exchange) students and post-doctoral researchers in the same manner as before (2007-11) by separate project budgets for the other researchers work and by utilizing separate funds for the applicant’s travelling expenses. This study will have both scientific (publications, MSc and PhD theses) and practical results for different Finnish industries. References: Miles R. E. & C. C. Snow (1978). Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process. New York McGraw-Hill Book Co. Takala J. (2007). Global Manufacturing Strategies Require “Dynamic Engineers?”: Case Study in Finnish Industries. Industrial Management & Data Systems , 326-344.
