EVALUATING MANUFACTURING STRATEGY FORMULATION PROCESSES

Over the years many manufacturing strategy formulation processes have been developed and criteria for judging the resulting strategies have been suggested. However, little work has been reported on the criteria against which the formulation processes can be judged. This paper pro poses a way of evaluating a manufacturing strategy formulation process rather than evaluating the resulting strategy. The criteria proposed in this paper are developed from the business and manufacturing strate gy literature and then tested and refined in a case study. Finally pre liminary conclusions are described which highlight apparent conflicts between desirable criteria and which suggest potentially important fac tors to be considered in the design of a manufacturing strategy formul ation process.