Linkages in Advanced Manufacturing Strategy: A Literature Review

1. Introduction

Over the years, manufacturing is evolved through the managerial decisions and practices. The structural decisions lay foundation for resource of the organization. The growth of Indian manufacturing depends on various such long term decisions. Manufacturing objectives cover cost, quality, delivery and flexibility and usually there are trade-offs between them. Flexibility and delivery are more important than quality and cost in the current manufacturing scenario. Customers want the delivery time as short as possible. To achieve this it is required to have a strategy. Basically there are four strategies: engineer-to-order, make-to-order, assemble-to-order, and make-to-stock. Customer involvement in the product design, delivery lead time, and inventory are influenced by each strategy (Arnold et.al, 2009). Today’s world is extremely dynamic and fast changing. International competitors are continuously working on improving manufacturing, bringing new products and making manufacturing more proactive and responsive (Chandra and Sastry, 1998). The new competition is in terms of reduced cost, improving quality, products with higher performance, a wider range of products and better services. Also it is required to understand the sequence of managerial decisions that need to be implemented to develop the competitive capability (Chandra, 2009). Mohanty (1995) elaborated on the corporate-manufacturing relationship in the contemporary context of global competition and outlined a need for improvements in corporate learning and development of effective methods for managing manufacturing functions from a strategic perspective.

The core idea with a literature review is to summarize the state of the art in the subject field, as a basis for identifying areas in which further research would be beneficial. The literature reviews are important in: (i) supporting the identification of a research topic, question or hypothesis; (ii) identifying the literature to which the research will make a contribution, and contextualizing the research within that literature; (iii) building an understanding of theoretical concepts and terminology; (iv) facilitating the building of a bibliography or list of the sources that have been consulted; (v) suggesting research methods that might be useful.

A comprehensive search of related research from 1982 to 2012 is applied to produce a synthesis of peer-reviewed literature. Based on this, 134 papers are collected (Table 1).