Abstract:
With the end of the Cold War and the subsequent reduction in defence spending, the
Taiwanese defence industry has encountered great difficulties. Recently, the
Government announced that at the end of 2006, all military plants should move from
the public sector to the private sector. The aim being not only to maintain a
manufacturing capability sufficient to ensure the technical competence and resources
necessary for an effective and timely response to a mobilisation but also to reduce
government infrastructure costs. However, unless the military plants take more
aggressive action to assess their management and manufacturing weaknesses
effectively, their modernisation efforts will not succeed.
This research is concerned with the development of a methodology for manufacturing
performance measurement and evaluation to help Taiwanese military plants develop
and maintain a competitive advantage. The basic concept of the proposed framework
is based on the Balanced Scorecard concept. However, the structure and procedures
have been further developed to reflect Taiwan's specific requirements. In particular,
the proposed framework provides a structure and tools to tackle a number of key
requirements, such as the need to provide both internal and external measures as a
means of both qualitatively and quantitatively prioritising and evaluating
manufacturing strategic concerns, and the need to show continuously where
improvement needs to be made.
Industrial case studies have shown that the proposed framework is both feasible and
effective when applied within the particular environment of Taiwanese military
plants. In addition the proposed framework has highlighted some theoretical and
practical problems associated with the design and development of manufacturing
performance measurement and evaluation framework.
Due to its generic nature, through interviews with three UK companies, it was
demonstrated that the proposed framework could also be applied to other societies and
industries, either public or private, to solve their manufacturing performance
measurement and evaluation problems.
