Proposals for Alternative Manufacturing Strategies for the Company of a Developed Country

In global open market, the trends forcing the companies and countries to change their production strategies are evident. The receiving developing countries have their challenges in adapting to a new situation. In addition, the companies and countries in industrialized countries are trying to find feasible strategies to adapt to the new trends. Value of products, rarity of production factors, inimitability of production process and non-substitutability of products and factors are claimed to give competitive advantages for the company. In principle this is clear, but how does the company should arrange its production to reach these kinds of features for its production strategies, is not clear. This concerns the companies, which mainly are currently located in industrialized countries with high factor costs. In Finland some years ago a project was established to find new industrial production strategies. The driving forces were then perceived to be the fast development of ICT technologies and their fast diffusion to new industries. In local manufacturing the role and strategy of differentiated manufacturers was seen feasible. This would not, however, automatically give any larger opportunities for worldwide growth. For the larger market the roles and strategies of global leader or global subcontractor could be possible also for companies coming from small countries. A global leader would emphasize the international brand in her marketing. A global subcontractor would emphasize production, production costs, and effectiveness of production in her operations. The emphasis in brand marketing and production would lead to global manufacturing systems with many system features, a kind of system house manufacturing role and strategy. In case of Finland it is possible to find examples from local manufacturers, global leader like Nokia Oyj, global manufacturers like Elcoteq Oyj, and system houses like some power plant or elevator manufacturers. It has been claimed that the present roles or strategies are not effective enough. Therefore, many paper companies, machinery producers and electronic producers have moved their production to the countries of lower production costs. It has also been claimed that industry based services will become very important for the evolution of the future industry structure in the industrialized small countries with high technology capabilities. One possibility is to look the options is to include to the consideration three more points of views or means of forming frameworks: 1. Theories high technology marketing, 2. Internationalization of companies and their activities, and 3. Reconfiguration of value networks in an international arena. This could lead to many interesting options in restructuring the production globally and seeking for new competitive advantages in production strategies. The new options would lead to development of product platforms, new architectures of products and product systems, and new type of systems development including prototyping products, prototyping new production systems. Product and manufacturing prototypes would lead to pilot building in industrialized countries. These pilots would be transferred to developing countries after market tests in industrialized countries. This would be systems engineering and development on industry and company level including production systems and strategies. The means for these kinds of roles and strategies of companies could be developed by theories of high technology marketing, internationalization theories of companies and reconfiguration of value networks. The paper is an idea proposal for research for production strategies on company level.