A METHODOLOGY FOR BUSINESS PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Current competitive environments lead companies to choose one core competence and to develop partnerships to take advantage of market opportunities. This type of association becomes more and more dynamic as product cycles shrink. This paper proposes to extend the Group Technology methods to the development of business partnerships. The first step is to consider the similarity among activities necessary to the product manufacturing, and to generate a dendrogram to help managers define the product assembly configuration. The second step is to suggest the use of Euclidian distance between the candidate company and the ideal company as a tool for the choice of partnership, taking as a standard the similarity between the two companies in the actions developed to achieve competitiveness. An application of the suggested methodology shows its usefulness and underscores the promising results of the utilization of today’s vast experience in the definition of manufacturing cells for the choice of companies for partnership, so as to build a production system involving several companies. Key-words: Business partnerships. Manufacturing systems. Modular assembly. Theory of similarity. Competitive strategy.