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Creating
a connection between different aspects of products, markets, production layout,
investments and the organizational infrastructure. Insight into this connection
is essential to make rational, strategic choices in production management.
Problems that might arise within organizations with an imbalance between different aspects of products, markets, production layout, investments and organizational infrastructure:
- The warehouse is missing materials
- Seasonal fluctuations
- Motivation of the workers
- Complexity with investments in new machines
- Lots of competition
- ERP-system which is far from optimal
Product profiling is a method to create an overview of the alignment between the market and business organization. The method is not a recipe for the execution of a strict analysis of a manufacturing strategy. The reason for this is that the method consists of too many elements that the user should use creatively and with some insight.
Globally, the method of product profiling consists of the following steps:
1. Select relevant aspects of products and markets, manufacturing, investments and costs, and organizational infrastructure (see the figure above for some examples). Be aware every situation might require other relevant aspects.
2. Create a table in which the characteristics of the product types are displayed for the chosen aspects.
3. Create profile(s) of one or more product types (order types) of parts of the organization. The profile provides qualitative information about the correlation between the market and the production process/investments/infrastructure. The correlation or consistency is better when there is a straight line. Deviations are called “dog legs” and ask for further analysis.
One important thing with product profiling is the awareness that every cross in the table is a relative decision: aspects are compared with other aspects of the product type.
In the way we just described product profiling, we assume the production of a complete product type has similar characteristics. However, normally practice is more complex. For example, an organization uses batch processing for several components and combines these components by making use of line processing. When this is the case and you do want to use product profiling, it is useful to cut between these processes and make different tables and profiles for different stadia of product components.
Hill, T. (1995). Manufacturing Strategy: Text and Cases. London: MACMILLEN PRESS LTD.