A fitness landscape model for manufacturing strategy.

Many studies analyse manufacturing organisations and their problems by reducing or
simply throwing away the interacting components; with the assumption that the latter
are either negligible or behave linearly. These studies (referred to as reductionism)
tend to overlook the importance of these interacting components. An alternative
view is to adopt a "complex systems" approach, to understand the manufacturing
organisation as a system which evolves over time by adopting characteristics to
survive. The aim of this research was to study the development and application of
fitness landscape theory (a theory that is part of complex systems theory) in
understandinga nd formulating manufacturings trategy. The creation and application
of fitness landscape models to help search and select capabilities for manufacturing
strategy is the principal area of novelty within this thesis.
Several researchers (Maguire, 1997b; Merry, 1998; Beinhocker, 1999) had noted that
fitness landscape theory was an appropriate theory for investigating and
understanding strategy, but none of these papers made any attempt to understand
fitness and relate it to organisations in terms of competitiveness, effectiveness or
survival. With this gap and above introduction the contribution that this thesis
makes to knowledge is in the following areas:
" The creation of knowledge on the boundaries and detail of complex systems
theory. This is summarised by a framework that relates the various concepts to
manufacturing management issues.
" To study manufacturing strategy. This thesis treats manufacturing organisations
as complex adaptive systems, with goal directed behaviour.
" The creation of a definition and model of "fitness" that is appropriate for
organisations in general. This is then developed into a manufacturing specific
definition and model. It was concluded that to increase fitness, a manufacturing
organisation must possess the ability to inherit, imitate and search manufacturing
strategy (or configuration) such as quality, delivery, flexibility, and cost." The above definitions and models are then related to manufacturing strategy
formulation in terms of the acquisition of specific capabilities (cost, quality,
flexibility and delivery)
" The models are then applied and tested on a population of UK manufacturing
organisations to explore the relationship between fitness and capabilities. A map
which indicates the relative fitness contribution by the four manufacturing
capabilities is presented.