Research On The Evolution Of Manufacturing Capabilities Of Enterprises From Supply Chain To Value Net

Peter Drucker, master of management, said,"today, enterprises do not compete onproducts, but on business models."Since the end of the 20th century, with thedevelopment of science and technology, the integration of world economy, and thegrowing internationalization of business, the maturity cycle of enterprises is becomingshorter and shorter and market competition is becoming more and more intense. In thiscontext, as a new business model, the value net tends to replace the traditional supplychain model. At present, manufacturing enterprises are creating more complex,multidimensional and high-integrated value net to obtain theirs own competitiveadvantages. However, this change will inevitably bring new challenges to manufacturingenterprises, especially to their manufacturing capabilities which are closely related toperformance. Manufacturing enterprises should possess different manufacturingcapabilities from the past to adapt to this trend. The objective of this thesis is to study theevolution of manufacturing capabilities of enterprises during the transition from supplychain to value net. It is hoped that this study can find the trend and law at various stagesof business model transition so as to propose suggestions for manufacturing enterprisesin their development.The author firstly reviewed relevant theories about supply chain, value net, andmanufacturing capabilities, and then summarized the results and insufficiency of extantresearches. On this basis, supply chain, value net and manufacturing capabilities weredifined. The judgements between supply chain and value net were regarded ascustomizated level, collaborative level, fast and agile level, and digital level. Theelements of manufacturing capabilities were considered to include delivery capability,flexible production capability, cost control capability, quality management capability,innovation capability, and service capability. According to extant literature, the authordivided the development of business model into three phases (i.e., the point stage, chainstage and net stage). Hypotheses were proposed on the relationship among the supplychain, value net and market environment, the relationship of business modeldevelopment and manufacturing capabilities evolution, as well as the moderating effectof market environment on the evolution of manufacturing capabilities. The theoreticalmodel was hence constructed and the research framework was designed accordingly. Thedata used in this thesis was from IMSS database and statistical analysis was conducted.Secondly, the author identified the characteristics of three stages of business modeldevelopment by cluster analysis and described the distributions of business model in various industries, regions or countries, and in different business scopes or sizes ofmanufacturing enterprises. Moreover, the author compared the performance and marketenvironment of manufacturing enterprises at different stages. The results of thiscomparison showed that compared with the supply chain model, the value net modelcould better enable manufacturing enterprises to adapt to the complex and ever-changingcustomer demand and fierce competitive market enviornment. It thus indicated that thetransition of the business model from supply chain to value net was the natural trend formanufacturing enterprises in the context of enternal enviornment and internal benefitdrive.Correspondently, the author analyzed manufacturing capabilities in the three stagesof business model development and summarized different typical manufacturingcapabilities which were quality management capability and flexible productioncapability (QF) at the point stage, innovation capability, quality management capability,and cost control capability (IQC) at the chain stage, and service capability and flexibleproduction capability (SF) at the net stage. According to the above results, the evolutionpatterns of manufacturing capabilities were put forward and the"evolution tree"ofmanufacturing capabilities was mapped out. In addition, the author concluded theevolution of key manufacturing capabilities such as service capability and flexibleproduction capability.Furthermore, the author discussed the evolution mechanism of manufacturingcapabilities by analyzing the moderating effect of market environment. Results ofhierarchical regression analysis showed that the competition mode had significantmoderating effect in the evolution of manufacturing capabilities. Then, the author usedmathematical method to describe the evolution mechanism of manufacturing capabilitiesbased on evolutionary game theory. The competition mode was further verified as adriver of the evolution of manufacturing capabilities.Based on the result of the above analysis, the author constructed the evolution pathmodel of manufacturing capabilities from supply chain to value net. When the businessmodel must be changed from the point stage to the chain stage due to marketenvironment changes, manufacturing enterprises should make great efforts on innovationcapability and cost control capability while maintaining quality management capability.When changing from the chain stage to the net stage, they needed to emphasize onupgrading sevice capability, and also to re-examine the importance of flexible productioncapability to obtain competitive advantages. The author suggested the achievementmeans of evolution from four perspectives of R&D, planning, production andcontrolling, technology as well as organization and management when manufacturingenterprises change their business model from the point stage to the chain stage or from the chain stage to the net stage. Finally, the upgrowth ways manufacturing capabilitieswere proposed including endogenesis and ectogenesis.