Future competitiveness: viewpoints from manufacturers and service providers

Purpose – This paper aims to compare and evaluate competitive priorities between manufacturers and service providers. A concern over the trends of moving manufacturing/production units overseas, while maintaining essential service operations at the companies' headquarters, encouraged senior administrators of the Federation of Thai Industries (FTI) to suggest the study. This study was part of an effort to support FTI members facing separate locations between manufacturing and services operations, and to help evaluate its initiatives' usefulness towards these members.Design/methodology/approach – The survey, developed by Takala, was modified to gather the opinions from top executives of 75 manufacturers and service providers. This survey consisted of six criteria or competitive priorities with a total of 31 dimensions. The basic statistical techniques such as Cronbach's α were applied.Findings – The paper finds that in general, top executives from manufacturing and service operations shared and agreed that ...

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