Business and Manufacturing Strategies: a Model for Alignment (Case Study: Iranian Automative Industry)

Production and operation strategy is one of the functional level strategies of the organization, which needs to be linked to business strategy and other functional strategies. Current literature divides production and operation into two main branches: manufacturing and service. The role and importance of manufacturing strategy in the successful performance of organizations was initially emphasized by Wickham Skinner’s work in 1969. In the following years, various studies have been conducted in this field, which could be divided into two main streams: (i) Content studies, which includes research on the reason and purpose of the subject (i.e. why manufacturing strategy?); (ii) Process studies that deal with the methodology of formulating manufacturing strategy (i.e. the know-how of planning manufacturing strategy). In this paper, after a literature review on various researches on manufacturing strategy, including its relation to strategies at corporate and business levels and various models for its formulation, a model has been developed and introduced to empower the linkage between manufacturing strategy from one hand and Business and corporate strategy from the other hand. The developed model then Combined to a decision Table and align the manufacturing strategy with Business Strategy. To validate the model developed by the researcher, it was introduced to experts in the automotive industry of Iran, who supported the model descriptively and analytically.