| Increased global competition, emerging technologies, product-related changes, and rising customer expectations have changed today's competitive manufacturing environment. Additionally, reengineering efforts over the last decade have led to closed manufacturing facilities and reallocated resources. These changes have serious implications for manufacturing strategies and the plant charters assigned to individual facilities.; Plant charters represent the assignment of specific products, processes, customers and/or markets to individual facilities within multi-facility manufacturing firms. These plant charter decisions have received limited exposure in the strategic planning literature with most of the research remaining primarily theoretical.; The main objectives of this study were to identify the primary dimensions differentiating facility strategy types and to develop a taxonomy of manufacturing strategic facility types. Significant differences of competitive priorities and performance between these manufacturing plant types were to be determined.; Based on responses from individuals at 305 manufacturing facilities, the study showed that the major dimensions that differentiate the structural composition of manufacturing facilities generally support those proposed in the literature. The major differentiators were related to product (volume and variety) and to a lesser extent processes, materials, and customers/markets.; The manufacturing strategic facility types developed as a result of the study are standardizers, customizers, and automators. The standardizers have high product volume with low material variety, average product variety and customer variety lower than the other clusters. The customizers, which included more facilities than the other two groups, had lower product volume than the other two types and higher product, material and customer variety than the standardizers. Customizers produce a variety of products, using a variety of materials, for a variety of customers. In order to cope with this variety, they are much more flexible than the other two types. The third type, automators, included the least number of facilities and had both high product volume and high product variety with a medium plant size. The processes for automators tend to be more complex than for the other types.; Competitive priority and performance indicator differences between the strategic manufacturing facility types are identified. As a result of these findings, managerial implications are addressed. |
