The impact of plant size and type of industry on manufacturing competitive priorities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to report and discuss the manufacturing competitive priorities (cost, delivery, quality, flexibility, and innovativeness) practiced by Kuwaiti manufacturers. It also investigates the possible impact of plant size and type of industry on the level of focus at different priorities. In addition, the level of association between different pairs of competitive priorities was investigated. This allowed testing the traditional competitive priorities trade‐off model which was frequently argued by early operations strategy researchers.Design/methodology/approachThe data collection method used in this study is that of the questionnaire that was administrated in 62 Kuwaiti plants working in two different industries, food processing and refractors. Level of focus (on a five‐point Likert scale) at each of the five competitive priorities, type of industry and number of employees were the main research variables. Since ordinal scales are used in the current study to measure the plant focus on the five competitive priorities, Mann‐Whitney test for two independent samples was used to test for the effect of type of industry and Kruska‐Wallis test was utilized to investigate the relationship between plant size and the level of focus on each competitive priority. In addition, testing the level of associations between degrees of emphasis on different pairs of competitive priorities was through the Goodman and Kruskal's γ coefficients.FindingsEmpirical evidence is provided that plant size is a useful indicator of the emphasis on some competitive priorities. It shows that small and medium plants place significantly more emphasis on on‐time delivery while medium and large plants are distinguished by their strong emphasis on flexibility. However, difference size groups indicate the same level of focus on quality improvement, cost reduction and innovativeness. Noticeably, the two industrial sectors do not differ significantly in their level of focus on each of the five competitive priorities. The two industries focused on on‐time delivery and quality improvement strategies as the two main competitive priorities. Both flexibility and innovativeness were the least emphasized priorities in both sectors. The preliminary findings do not seem to support the main argument of the competitive priorities trade‐off model.Research limitations/implicationsOwing to the limitation of data, only employment was the only indicator of plant size. Total revenue and total assets could be used in future studies to verify or deny these findings. Moreover, using a better multidimensional construct in measuring the level of focus on each competitive priority represents another way of improving this study.Originality/valueThe paper adds to the scarce body of empirical studies of manufacturing strategies in newly emerged economies. This is especially true in the Middle East and the Gulf areas. The findings augment the development of a better contingency theory of plant competitive priorities to capture the complexity of different plant characteristics.