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從動態競爭觀點審視作業流程管理的創新與改進
4
grounded in the literature and empirical evidence. The end result is an internally consistent
theory that offers a deeper understanding of process competition (Schmenner and Swink,
1998; Choi, Dooley, and Rungtusanatham, 2001; Schroeder, 2008).
This paper
ʼ
s primary contribution is demonstrating that the firm
ʼ
s competitive tension
substantially impacts rivals
ʼ
process development resisting them to replace its current best
practice. Instead of treating competition as an exogenous factor as is the norm in the existing
literature, we find that firms may act strategically to manage the competitive tension.
Operations management literature suggests that a firm is more likely to invest in innovation
when its rival builds greater barriers to its process improvement over time such that the
frequency of process innovation increases in parallel with the intensity of competition
(Mendelson and Pillai, 1999). Contrary to this accepted wisdom, our analysis shows that
competition can decrease the frequency of process innovation for the followers. In other words,
a leading firm with the current industrial frontier of operational processes can publicize its
superior processes to elicit its rivals
ʼ
investment in improvement capability. Thus, the ease of
imitation, together with the threat of strong retaliation from the industry leader, curbs the
follower firms
ʼ
radical process innovation, and reduces their likelihood of developing
innovative processes. We justify this insight and other results in subsequent sections.
2. Process Competition: An Illustration
Operational excellence plays a crucial role in the automobile industry, which organizes
human and physical resources to manufacture vehicles in pursuit of a competitive edge.
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing firms have faced increasing
competition with every technology advancement. With the Digital Revolution, today
ʼ
s
manufacturers are facing ever increasing pressure to improve and innovate processes at
faster rates just to keep pace. From the days of CP to the rise of MPS, then TPS,
manufacturing processes have co-evolved with competition. To better understand process
competition in this industry, we surveyed literature and synthesized their empirical findings.
One finding stands out: A revolutionary process emerges to improve the weaknesses of the
existing best practice and outmaneuver it
during the action-reaction exchanges
under
competition.
In the CP age, the manufacturing system served customers by making exactly what the
customer requested, one at a time (Womack, Jones, and Roos, 1990). Yet the goods were
rather costly. In the early twentieth century, a competing process, MPS, was developed to
address the CP’s flaw in affordability by offering low-priced mass-produced goods