To compete or not to compete?

Competition and customer focus must of essence be at the heart of manufacturing. African manufacturing infrastructure has often been stuck in the old mentality of being a necessary evil. Competitive advantage is never thought to come from manufacturing. Instead of formulating and effectively contributing to the corporate strategy that drives marketing, sales, distribution and other business functions, many of us African production managers and operations executives find ourselves bending in response to what marketing says needs to be done for the customer. This is often done without effectively evaluating the competencies of the manufacturing function.

Let us compete. The question is how and in what? I have found that few factories across the part of the continent that I have experienced will have a formal manufacturing strategy. Simply a policy that binds all the activities of manufacturing in a coordinated and singular direction. Towards effective competition. The production managers and managing directors who have been exposed to some lean manufacturing techniques that focus on waste minimization, increasing throughput, reducing tardiness,the list goes on, have implemented these without responding to the vital yet seemingly simple question, how do we compete?

It is important to be practical. Taking a text book slant is always a temptation to be resisted. Our goal as African and global manufacturing competitors should be to create knowledge from our practical experiences. The principles may be the same, the practice and application is never the same .Have you ever wondered what the difference is between General motors and Toyota. How do they compete? They are both aware of the same principles to be employed in manufacturing management. How does GM compete in relation to how Toyota competes? Let’s leave that for another day. The point to drive home is, how your product or operation manages to meet customer needs more efficiently than the factory next door. That’s what wins orders.

Traditionally three areas in the study of manufacturing strategies have been identified. This generally encapsulates any factory or operation that competes. Competition can be on the basis of price, product or service. These may seems like three simple words however they form the foundation of logically building the actual activities that are to be carried out on the factory floor, in designing, maintenance or production planning. Let me provide a real life example of what I came across when I went shopping for some insect killer.

My intention is not to provide any free advertising. I simply want to practically illustrate a point. Take these three products for example, raid supper fast, raid max and doom multi insects.

These product lines seemed to be from the same manufacturer. What is the basis of competition? The price did not vary that much. I could have bought any of the three. The service well is not much a factor because I did not have to worry about delivery speeds. The product was there on time, on the shelf, ready for the taking. These three products competed against each other on the basis of product.

Raid supper fast kills cockroaches without the pungent smell, I liked it. However I wanted to kill both roaches and mosquitoes. The problem with max was that it stinks and only kills roaches. It is certainly not a nice smell during a meal. Multi insects enabled me to kill both mosquitoes and roaches and perfume the house and leave a nice lingering scent. These products could be addressing different customer needs, but hats off to the marketing team and manufacturing team that managed to segment the market and define the product lines effectively.

Let’s get down to the factory floor. How did the manufacturing departments respond to the challenge of setting up the factory to compete effectively by providing product variety along different niche markets? Product development and design, most likely in the lab had to focus on quality in the form of efficacy of the chemical. The scent had to be built into the chemical set up. Packaging had to be attractive and communicate effectively that you can kill both roaches and mosquitoes without setting off a pungent scent in the house.

The key to competition in this case is to focus the entire manufacturing function on setting up innovative product designs. The manufacturing strategy has to set up competitive objectives or goals based on quality and product design flexibility. Tasks are then defined from that stand point to focus on say for example technology used in R&D for product innovation and design. The line itself may have investment in technology that allows for flexibility. This could mean same container sizes to minimize product change over.

How do you compete? Please respond to this posting and let’s dialogue.