Lean, Agile and Service-oriented performers: templates of organising in a global production field

Abstract

Organisations adhere to the templates of organising by adopting a coherent set of strategic priorities and organising practices with expectation of developing certain performance capabilities. The most prevalent templates of organising for manufacturing organisations are Lean and Agile templates. However, recent advances in digital technologies provide a fertile context for the emergence of new organisation templates. There is broad agreement that digital technologies facilitate the development of service innovations in manufacturing organisations. However, it is still not confirmed whether service-oriented templates are used with any degree of regularity among manufacturing firms. The clustering of the performance dimensions of service, cost, flexibility, and digitalisation of manufacturing organisations enables us to identify the following three types of organisations: Lean, Agile and Service-oriented performers. Our results show that adherence to a Lean template does not provide a competitive advantage regarding the cost performance dimension. Adherence to an Agile template provides a marginal competitive advantage regarding the flexibility performance dimension. Finally, adherence to a Service-oriented template provides a considerable competitive advantage regarding the service performance.