Towards balancing multiple competitiveness measures for improving business performance in manufacturing

Today, companies are facing tremendous challenges of how to provide the agility that came from "craft manufacturing" with the cost benefits that were the results of "mass production". "Concurrent Engineering", coupled with automation efforts, is becoming vital in maintaining a competitive posture in today's marketplace. Competitiveness in this context represents a system's total performance. It is important to note that the performance of an organisational unit is governed largely by the system in which it is contained. It would be a worthless exercise to improve the business performance of a local unit without changing the entire system, if units were interdependent. Business performance is an effective measure of how inputs (people, materials, means, etc.) are utilised in a certain period (measured in terms of operating expenses), in order to realise certain useful outputs in this period. The paper proposes a method for finding a cumulative balancing index for optimising a company's total competitiveness position based on the following eight independently measured factors: overall productivity; time-to-market; customer satisfaction; cost-of-quality; profitability; inventory; quality; unscheduled changes.