Manufacturing - The Missing Link in Corporate Strategy

Notes taken from HBR Article by Wickham Skinner 1969 The thesis of the article is that manufacturing has for too long been dominated by experrts and industrial engineers. Executive management avoided direct involvement with the complexities of operations but it meant that the manufacturing managers were ignorant of corporate policy and goals. Skinner explains a systematic way to link the strategy of the organization to manufacturing

• 1. Companies get blinkered by high volume low cost efficency concepts
• 2. There are operation trade offs that must be decided between
• 3
  • A - Analyse the competitive position
  • B - Crticical appraisal of resources
  • C. Formulate Company Strategy
  • D. Define the implication of the strategy - what can we do, serve? etc
  • E. Study the limitations and constraints of the PT and Economics of the Industry
  • F Integrate and synthesize the previous steps
  • G. Set performance standards

It is a top-down approach