Many of the new pressures from today's manufacturing environment are turning manufacturing managers' attention to the virtues of developing a flexible manufacturing function. Flexibility, however, has different meanings for different managers and several perfectly legitimate alternative paths exist towards flexible manufacturing. How managers in ten companies view manufacturing flexibility in terms of how they see the contribution of manufacturing flexibility to overall company performance; what types of flexibility they regard as important; and what their desired degree of flexibility is. The results of the investigations in these ten companies are summarised in the form of ten empirical “observations”. Based on these “observations” a check‐list of prescriptions is presented and a hierarchical framework developed into which the various issues raised by the “observations” can be incorporated.

A crucial stage in the formulation of operations strategy is the derivation of a ranked (or rated) list of competitive factors such as quality, flexibility, cost, etc. This list is used either to infer an appropriate set of strategic operations decisions or alternatively it is used in conjunction with an independently derived list of the organization's performance to prioritize each of the competitive factors. Martilla and James[1] take the latter approach to derive an importance-performance matrix. The investigations reported in this article examine how the matrix can be modified to reflect managers' perceived relationships between "importance", "performance" and "priority for improvement". Two investigations are reported; one deals with operations improvement at the level of the whole operations function, the other at the level of the department or micro-operation. A different zoning of the importanceperformance matrix to that used by Martilla and James is proposed.Using the modified matrix allowed the managers who participated in the investigation to explore improvement priorities in their operations in an effective manner. One of the more significant activities in the operations strategy formulation process is the derivation of a list of competitive factors (also called critical success factors, performance objectives or competitive variables) which is prioritized in terms of the relative importance of each competitive factor. Typically such a list ranks or rates those factors which the operations function contributes to the competitiveness of the organization. So, for example, quality may be regarded as more important than product or service range but less so than price, and so on. All the significant methods of operations strategy formulation include some prioritization, for example Hayes and Wheelwright[2], Hill [3], Fine and Hax[4] and Platts and Gregory [5]. Many of these methods are discussed in Voss [6].After this list has been formulated it can be used in two ways:(1) As a translation device between the market aspirations of the organization and the various areas of operations strategy (often divided into structural and infrastructural decisions as in Hayes and Wheelwright[2]). For example, Hill's[3] well-known method of manufacturing strategy formulation uses these competitive factors in this way.

No abstract

Operations strategy is a term that is often used to indicate one of the two departures from the better‐known term, Manufacturing Strategy.