| Summary: | 博士 === 中華大學 === 科技管理研究所 === 91 === Unlike some of the industrialized countries in Asia (e.g., Japan and Korea), where major conglomerates account for the majority of economic activities, Taiwan has traditionally relied on its small and medium sized firms to compete in international markets since the 1970s. Over the last decade they have found themselves facing increasing technological innovation and more severe competition from nearly developing countries. Constantly changing technology induces product and process innovation and shorter product life cycles. To deal with more dynamic and competitive market, the literature has suggested the development of manufacturing flexibility as a new strategic imperative (Gerwin, 1993; Suarez et al., 1996; Chang et al., 2003a).
Gerwin (1993) suggested that manufacturing flexibility is a multi-dimensional capability and companies must select ones that fit with their product strategy and market niche to reach strategic goals. Given the fact, to investigate the manufacturing flexibility in alignment with product strategy and verify the impact of this matching on business performance are the research purposes. In this research, manufacturing flexibility dimensions include new product flexibility, product range flexibility, and volume flexibility. Besides, product strategy dimensions include the timing of introducing new product, the board of product line, product pricing level and lot size. Also, profit ratio is the index of business performance.
This paper established the fitting relationship between manufacturing flexibility dimensions and product strategy to be research hypotheses and examined empirically based on the data collected from 149 hand tool manufacturing firms. This study results indicate that firms must adopt their product strategy based on different dimensions of manufacturing flexibility advantage in order to improve the performance in profit ratio.
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