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In the face of uncertain future product demand and short product life cycle, firms’ increasing manufacturing flexibility is a key strategy for improving market responsiveness. Due to its important, production managers have the concentration on manu-facturing management programs as the ways to enhance manu-facturing flexibility. According to Upton’s (1994) framework for analyzing the specific dimension of manufacturing flexibility, which is a multi-dimensional capability, this study divided volume flexibility into three distinct forms named volume range, volume mobility, and volume uniformity flexibility. This re-search will use path analysis method to testify the hypothesis, which demonstrate the causal relationship of volume flexibility forms, manufacturing management programs, and business per-formance based on the empirical data collected from Taiwan’s 56 Machine Tools manufacturing firms. According our research results, our findings as follows: 1. Firms adopting different manufacturing management programs have the different influence on the product flexibility forms. Such as close relationship with sup-pliers is positive associated empirically with volume range flexibility; programmable equipments and multi-skill employee are positive associated empirically with volume mobility flexibility; the degree of work force involved in quality improvement program, the close re-lationship with suppliers and the degree of part re-usability are positive associated with volume uniformity flexibility. 2. The trade-offs between those three forms of volume flexibility are existing, such as volume mobility flexi-bility has the positive effect on volume range flexibility; volume mobility flexibility has the negative effect on volume uniformity flexibility. 3. Volume flexibility forms also have different contribu-tion on net profit and sales growth, such as volume mo-bility flexibility has positive contribution on net profit, volume uniformity has positive contribution on sales growth, and volume range flexibility has positive con-tribution on net profit but has negative effect on sales growth.
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