Papers by Keyword: Business Performance

Abstract: The relationship between supply chain practices and business performance has been widely investigated by many academics and practitioners; however, the relationship is not yet fully understood. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the relevance of several prominent theories in strategic management for explaining the mediating role of operational capability in the relationship between supply chain practices and business performance. The resource-based view of the firm and neo-institutional theory are reviewed for their applicability to relate supply chain practices and operational capability in explaining sustained business performance. Supply chain practices are insufficient to drive business performance. Firms need to be able simultaneously to increase efficiency through supply chain practices and to be innovative through operational capability. Specifically, operational capability is forwarded as a key firm-specific capability that can result in significant and long-term improvement in organisational sustainability. Operational capability can serve as a critical mediating factor that better transmits the ambitions of supply chain practices onto business performance. As such, this paper provides a conceptual support to urge further research to empirically evaluate the relationship between supply chain practices, operational capability and business performance.

Abstract: Knowledge has been regarded as an important resource for firms to compete in todays competitive environment. Since knowledge and knowledge management are so important for achieving business performance, the knowledge strategies are likely to be a critical issue of strategic choice for the firm. Evidences showed that the implementation of KM strategy can cultivate organizational dynamic capabilities to improve knowledge quality and quantity, as well as for consolidating the value and practicability of knowledge. Thus, this study tries to examine the impact of KM strategy on knowledge management performance as well as business performance. According to the empirical data collected from manufacturing industry in Taiwan, meaningful findings and conclusions will be proposed and discussed.

Abstract: We perfect Product-Process Matrix theory of Hayes and Wheelwright and propose a more generalized theoretical strategic model. In this paper, the data from International Manufacturing Strategy Survey in 2009 is used to examine the new model by hierarchical regression analysis. The results show that, different matches between flexible production capacity (manufacturing strategy), speed of product update and product customization (market strategy) will lead different business performance. The results improve the Product-Process Matrix theory, and provide theoretical and practical guidance to manufacturing enterprises for strategies choice.

Abstract: This paper aims to investigate the relationship among business strategies and business performance in global and local manufacturing companies. The research is based an International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS2005) of about 700 companies from more than 20 countries. We first proposed a new method to construct a generic measure of business performance from the available performance measures in IMSS. Based on this new measure we developed a simple discriminant analysis to allocate each entry (company in the IMSS) into a particular category of business performance. Of course we performed some statistical tests to confirm the validity of this classification. We then analysed the contribution (importance) of various environmental and competitive variables to each category of the generic business performance in order to identify the most influential variables and notice of their difference among different business performances. This was done intuitively using graphical analysis, but we also carried out statistical tests to confirm that companies at different performance levels do operate at different environments and pay different attentions to competitive strategies. The models we developed are simple but novel and very practical. The results showed significant differences among business performances in terms of influential variables, and we conclude that this method can also be used to analyse other part of the data from the IMSS.