Traditional manufacturing is moving from Europe to Asia. This new "China effect" influences the manufacturing strategies of many different business areas. Manufacturing strategies have been changing from focused in 1970's to multi-focused in the 2000s. Nowadays, the companies must excel simultaneously in quality, time, and costs, as well as in flexibility. Multifocused strategies have not been empirically tested under the influence of China effect taking the dynamic, complex and situational business strategies into account. This study compares the competitive priorities of manufacturing strategies in four different types of companies with some international comparisons and one longitudinal case study for benchmarking, to show the other companies the route for developments. All these companies are in some way affected by the China effect. As a result of these case studies, it is possible to understand the competitive priorities of manufacturing strategies for the case companies. The AHP method also made possible to compare inconsistencies in the answers between the companies. All four types of companies should grow internationally and utilize the developing countries as a means of lowering costs. But each type of company has its own special strategies to suit their markets. Companies in western countries should utilize multifocused manufacturing strategies based on their business strategy in a holistic way, e.g. through RAL concept, and to specialize through quality, e.g. by differentiating product and service technology for global high dynamic and complex business. Global sourcing in purchasing shall also be more and more used effectively for cost and productivity competitiveness. The development steps, from technology specialist to problem solver, are also proposed. Human resources have to be trained to be more "dynamic engineers", all the time more also in industrial engineering and management.

The article deals with a matter of principle logistics as a scientific discipline, its location in scientific area and its relation to other fields of science. Defines logistics as part of cybernetics and characterizes the basic criteria for the existence of research disciplines and they are: feed forward system, system approach, principles and tools of logistic, objects of logistics – flows and chains, control variables and optimization criteria.

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This article describes a methodical framework that combines two specific methods of Lean management, namely the ABC method and the MRP planning method. The article further argues that combining the ABC inventory method with subsequent MRP planning is beneficial if the combination is implemented in practice. To demonstrate the benefits, the framework is tested using a case study company. The presented case-study problem is to reduce the number of changeover downtimes in the environment of an engineering production company. The researched company deals with the problem of setting up production lines in a way to minimize the number of downtimes within one work shift. Within the solution, four possible variants of the production plan are presented. By combining the ABC and MRP methods, up to four changeovers can be saved, which in financial terms represents a saving of about EUR 450,000 per year.