| Summary: | Current competitive environments lead companies to choose one core competence
and to develop partnerships to take advantage of market opportunities. This type of
association becomes more and more dynamic as product cycles shrink. This paper proposes to
extend the Group Technology methods to the development of business partnerships. The first
step is to consider the similarity among activities necessary to the product manufacturing, and
to generate a dendrogram to help managers define the product assembly configuration. The
second step is to suggest the use of Euclidian distance between the candidate company and the
ideal company as a tool for the choice of partnership, taking as a standard the similarity
between the two companies in the actions developed to achieve competitiveness. An
application of the suggested methodology shows its usefulness and underscores the promising
results of the utilization of today’s vast experience in the definition of manufacturing cells for
the choice of companies for partnership, so as to build a production system involving several
companies.
Key-words: Business partnerships. Manufacturing systems. Modular assembly. Theory of
similarity. Competitive strategy.
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