A comparative study of implementation of manufacturing strategies in Thai and Indian automotive manufacturing companies

Companies must develop and maintain a high degree of coherence among competitive priorities, order-winning criteria, and improvement activities due to the competitive market and customer pressures. This paper presents findings of an empirical survey on manufacturing strategies implementation in new industrialized countries (NICs). Data were obtained from 68 and 54 automotive manufacturing companies in India and Thailand with 21.7% and 21.8% response rates, respectively, and analyzed through the inferential statistics. The results indicate that the focused competitive priorities of companies in both countries are improving product and process-related quality and on-time delivery. In addition, this study found that companies are trying to enhance the competitive priorities by implementing one of two infrastructural manufacturing strategies from among total quality management (TOM), just-in-time (JIT) production, statistical process control (SPC), and material requirements planning (MRP). Finally, conformance quality and manufacturing efficiency are considered the most important order-winning criteria in this industry in both countries.