No abstract

The paper appraises strategic alliances and corporate effectiveness. The findings of the study are; strategic alliance of firms leads to effectiveness, it helps in sourcing the required capital, it minimizes competition among firms in similar market and it is a tool for penetrating saturated or complex markets. The study concludes that: Strategic alliances provide opportunities for participants to tap into the resources, knowledge, and skills of their collaborators; it provides social potential for the strategic allies to significantly leverage its member"s resources and capabilities, it helps Indexed African Journals Online: www.ajol.info partners in an alliance to overcome legal, political and socio-cultural barriers to cross-national transactions. The paper recommends that firms that aim at achieving effectiveness in their operations in the face of scarce resources should take advantage of strategic alliance through which they will be able to accumulate adequate capital, penetrate saturated or complex markets, fight competition, and achieve competitive advantage.

Unconscious or informal application and failure to acknowledge the use of operations research (OR) approach by corporate managers has been going on globally for a very long time. This largely accounts for the inability of scholars to make accurate assessment of the level of application of operations research in the non-academic environment. It is therefore evident that asking an operations manager whether OR models or methodology is applied by his company may likely not produce a response that truly represents reality as some may be unknowingly making such applications. This study therefore examined the level of awareness of OR among corporations in the Nigerian manufacturing sector. It also assessed the extent of familiarity with OR models among managers in the manufacturing sector and their appreciation of OR techniques as a viable business decision-making tool. Consequently, steps that constitute the decision-making procedure of firms in the manufacturing industry of Nigerian economy were examined to determine the extent to which OR methodology or philosophy may have been incorporated.