Development and validation of resource flexibility measures for manufacturing industry
Abstract: Global competition
and ever changing customers demand have made manufacturing organizations to
rapidly adjust to complexities, uncertainties, and changes. Therefore,
flexibility in manufacturing resources is necessary to respond cost effectively
and rapidly to changing production needs and requirements. Ability of manufacturing resources to
dynamically reallocate from one stage of a production process to another in
response to shifting bottlenecks is recognized as resource flexibility. This
paper aims to develop and validate resource flexibility measures for
manufacturing industry that could be used by managers/ practitioners in
assessing and improving the status of resource flexibility for the optimum
utilization of resources.
Design/methodology/approach: The study involves survey carried out in
Indian manufacturing industry using a questionnaire to assess the status of
various aspects of resource flexibility and their relationships. A
questionnaire was specially designed covering various parameters of resource
flexibility. Its reliability was checked by finding the value of Cronback alpha
(0.8417). Relative weightage of various measures was found out by using
Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Pearson’s coefficient of correlation
analysis was carried out to find out relationships between various parameters.
Findings: From detailed review of literature on resource flexibility, 17
measures of resource flexibility and 47 variables were identified. The
questionnaire included questions on all these measures and parameters. ‘Ability
of machines to perform diverse set of operations’ and ability of workers to
work on different machines’ emerged to be important measures with contributing
weightage of 20.19% and 17.58% respectively.
All the measures were found to be significantly correlated with overall
resource flexibility except ‘training of workers’, as shown by Pearson’s
coefficient of correlation. This indicates that companies do not want to spend
on worker training.
Practical implications: The study provides guidelines to managers/
practitioners in assessing and managing resource flexibility for optimum
utilization of resources. This study can also help the firm’s management to
identify the measures and variables to manage resource flexibility and the
order in which stress should be given to various measures and actions. The
developed and validated measures can be used globally for managing the resource
flexibility in manufacturing sector.
Originality/value: In this work, the theoretical perspective has been
used to prepare the instrument from a detailed review of literature and then
the study carried out using the questionnaire in an area where such studies
were not carried out earlier.
Keywords: Resource
flexibility; measures; manufacturing industry; survey; analytical hierarchy
process.
Author: Gulshan Chauhan, T.P.
Sing
Journal Code: jptindustrigg140026
