Performance Measurement of Technology-Production Base of the Firms: Ascertaining Their Strategic Competitive Advantage

The strategic use of resources and dynamic capabilities that compose the "Technology-Production Base" (TPB) build an absolute strategic advantage for a firm's competitiveness. Thus, the performance measurement of constituents of TPB becomes a key priority to the manufacturing firm. By this consideration, the purpose of this paper is to define a reliable and user-friendly set of measures as key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflects the TPB's constituents and assesses the strategy performance of a manufacturing firm appropriately. The study rests on the novel theoretical model of the firm's TPB established by analysis of its three basic constituents-machinery, human resources, and the interaction relationships of humanware-regarding them as measurable elements. The results from analysis of the firm's TPB are the novel concepts of "Strategy-Focused Manufacturing," "Wheel of TPB Creation," and "TPB Scorecard," which comprises a set of 20 KPIs tested in an initial research project in which were involved three internationally competing manufacturing firms.