A non-conventional competitive manufacturing strategy for sustainable industrial enterprises

Abstract

Although industrial enterprises require to be evaluated based on traditional performance measures (cost, time and quality), non-traditional performance measures are urgent to be used and adopted. In this paper, a non-conventional competitive manufacturing strategy (NCCMS) is suggested and presented through three non-traditional performance measures such as: industrial complexity, industrial leanness and industrial agility. Minimising complexity; maximising leanness and agility are considered the major objectives. These performance measures are implicitly including the traditional competitive measures beside strategic and tactic performance measures. The novelty of this paper is the development of NCCMS by including complexity performance measure as a new dimension integrating and interacting with agility and leanness. This paper is also used to develop a theoretical approach with practical application to integrating the major objectives into one aggregate performance measure index. This index is so called the NCCMS index. Estimation levels of complexity, agility and leanness in industrial enterprises are firstly evaluated individually by using a fuzzy logic methodology; integrating between two objectives and aggregating or interacting between the three objectives by using analytical hierarchical process (AHP). A real-life case study is used to illustrate the proposed approach. The results show that the complexity measure is important and urgent to be minimised for achieving agility and leanness.